if 



7. 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 


THEY 
SHALL  NOT  PASS 


BY 

FRANK  H.  SIMONDS 

AUTHOR  OF  "THE  GREAT  WAR" 


GARDEN  CITY  NEW  YORK 

DOUBLEDAY,  PAGE  &  COMPANY 

1916 


Copyright,  19 IB,  by 

DOUBLEDAY,    PAGE    &    COMPANY 

All  rights  reserved,  including  that  of 

translation  into  foreign  languages, 

including  the  Scandinavian 


COPYRIGHT,  1916,  THE  TRIBUNE  ASS'N. 


SRLfi 

URU 


Grateful  acknowledgment  is  hereby  made 
to  the  New  York  Tribune  for  permission 
to  reprint  these  articles  in  book  form. 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I.    MY     TRIP    TO     VERDUN — GENERAL 

PETAIN  FACE  TO  FACE.      ...         3 

The  men  who  hold  the  line — what 
their  faces  told  of  the  past  and  the  fu- 
ture of  France. 

II.    MY    TRIP    TO    VERDUN— A    DYING, 

SHELL-RIDDEN  CITY 43 

The  Vauban  Citadel,  in  the  shelter 
of  which  falling  shells  cannot  find  you 
— houses  and  blocks  that  are  vanishing 
hourly — "but  William  will  not  come" 
— war  that  is  invisible — a  luncheon 
underground  with  a  toast  to  America — 
the  last  courtesy  from  a  general  and  a 
host — nothing  that  was  not  beautiful. 

III.    BATTLE  OF  VERDUN  ANOTHER  GETTYS- 
BURG     72 

Failure  of  Crown  Prince  likened  by 
French  to  "high  tide"  of  confederacy. 


viii  CONTENTS 

PAGE 

IV.    VERDUN,   THE    DOOR   THAT    LEADS 

NOWHERE 95 

The  battle  and  the  topography  of 
the  battlefield — an  analysis  of  the  at- 
tack and  defence. 

V.    IN  SIGHT  OF  THE  PROMISED  LAND — 

ON  THE  LORRAINE  BATTLEFIELD     .     116 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 


I 

MY  TRIP  TO  VERDUN— GENERAL 
PETAIN  FACE  TO  FACE 

THE  MEN  WHO  HOLD  THE  LINE — WHAT  THEIR 
FACES  TOLD  OF  THE  PAST  AND  THE  FUTURE 
OF  FRANCE 

MY  ROAD  to  Verdun  ran  through  the 
Elysee  Palace,  and  it  was  to  the 
courtesy  and  interest  of  the  Presi- 
dent of  the  French  Republic  that  I  owed  my 
opportunity  to  see  the  battle  for  the  Meuse 
city  at  close  range.  Already  through  the 
kindness  of  the  French  General  Staff  I  had 
seen  the  Lorraine  and  Marne  battlegrounds 
and  had  been  guided  over  these  fields  by 
officers  who  had  shared  in  the  opening  bat- 
tles that  saved  France.  But  Verdun  was 
more  difficult;  there  is  little  time  for  caring 
for  the  wandering  correspondent  when  a  de- 

3 


4  THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

cisive  contest  is  going  forward,  and  quite 
naturally  the  General  Staff  turned  a  deaf  ear 
to  my  request. 

Through  the  kindness  of  one  of  the  many 
Frenchmen  who  gave  time  and  effort  to 
make  my  pilgrimage  a  success  I  was  at  last 
able  to  see  M.  Poincare.  Like  our  own 
American  President,  the  French  Chief  Mag- 
istrate is  never  interviewed,  and  I  mention 
this  audience  simply  because  it  was  one 
more  and  in  a  sense  the  final  proof  for  me  of 
the  friendliness,  the  courtesy,  the  interest 
that  the  American  will  find  to-day  in  France. 
I  had  gone  to  Paris,  my  ears  filled  with  the 
warnings  of  those  who  told  me  that  it  was 
hard  to  be  an  American  in  Europe,  in  France, 
in  the  present  hour.  I  had  gone  expecting, 
or  at  least  fearing,  that  I  should  find  it  so. 

Instead,  from  peasant  to  President  I 
found  only  kindness,  only  gratitude,  only 
a  profound  appreciation  for  all  that  Amer- 
icans had  individually  done  for  France  in 
the  hour  of  her  great  trial.  These  things 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS  5 

and  one  thing  more  I  found:  a  very  intense 
desire  that  Americans  should  be  able  to 
see  for  themselves;  the  Frenchman  will 
not  talk  to  you  of  what  France  has  done, 
is  doing;  he  shrinks  from  anything  that 
might  suggest  the  imitation  of  the  Ger- 
man method  of  propaganda.  In  so  far  as 
it  is  humanly  possible  he  would  have  you 
see  the  thing  for  yourself  and  testify  out  of 
your  own  mouth. 

Thus  it  came  about  that  all  my  difficul- 
ties vanished  when  I  had  been  permitted 
to  express  to  the  President  my  desire  to 
see  Verdun  and  to  go  back  to  America — I 
was  sailing  within  the  week — able  to  re- 
port what  I  had  seen  with  my  own  eyes  of 
the  decisive  battle  still  going  forward  around 
the  Lorraine  city.  Without  further  delay, 
discussion,  it  was  promised  that  I  should  go 
to  Verdun  by  motor,  that  I  should  go  cared 
for  by  the  French  military  authorities  and 
that  I  should  be  permitted  to  see  all  that 
one  could  see  at  the  moment  of  the  contest. 


6  THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

We  left  Paris  in  the  early  afternoon; 
my  companions  were  M.  Henri  Ponsot, 
chief  of  the  Press  Service  of  the  Ministry 
of  Foreign  Affairs,  and  M.  Hugues  le  Roux, 
a  distinguished  Frenchman  of  letters  well 
known  to  many  Americans.  To  start  for 
the  battlefield  from  a  busy,  peaceful  city, 
to  run  for  miles  through  suburbs  as  quiet 
and  lacking  in  martial  aspect  as  the  regions 
beyond  the  Harlem,  at  home,  was  a  thing 
that  seemed  almost  unreal;  but  only  for  a 
brief  moment,  for  war  has  come  very  near  to 
Paris,  and  one  may  not  travel  far  in  Eastern 
France  without  seeing  its  signs. 

In  less  than  an  hour  we  were  passing 
the  rear  of  the  line  held  by  the  British  at 
the  Battle  of  the  Marne,  and  barely  sixty 
minutes  after  we  had  passed  out  through 
the  Vincennes  gate  we  met  at  Courtacon 
the  first  of  the  ruined  villages  that  for 
two  hundred  miles  line  the  roadways  that 
lead  from  the  capital  to  Lorraine  and  Cham- 
pagne. Suddenly  in  the  midst  of  a  peaceful 


countryside,  after  passing  a  score  of  undis- 
turbed villages,  villages  so  like  one  to  another, 
you  come  to  one  upon  which  the  storm  has 
burst,  and]instead  of  snug  houses,  smiling  faces, 
the  air  of  contentment  and  happiness  that 
was  France,  there  is  only  a  heap  of  ruins, 
houses  with  their  roofs  gone,  their  walls 
torn  by  shell  fire,  villages  abandoned  par- 
tially or  wholly,  contemporary  Pompeiis, 
overtaken  by  the  Vesuvius  of  Krupp. 

Coincidentally  there  appear  along  the 
roadside,  in  the  fields,  among  the  plough 
furrows,  on  every  side,  the  crosses  that 
mark  the  graves  of  those  who  died  for  France 
— or  for  Germany.  Along  the  slope  you 
may  mark  the  passage  of  a  charge  by  these 
crosses;  those  who  fell  were  buried  as  they 
lay,  French  and  Germans  with  equal  care. 
Indeed,  there  is  a  certain  pride  visible  in  all 
that  the  French  do  for  their  dead  foes. 
Alongside  a  hamlet  wantonly  burned,  burned 
by  careful  labor  and  with  German  thorough- 
ness; in  villages  where  you  will  be  told  of 


8  THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

nameless  atrocities  and  shameful  killings, 
you  will  see  the  German  graves,  marked  by 
neat  crosses,  surrounded  by  sod  embank- 
ments, marked  with  plaques  of  black  and 
white;  the  French  are  marked  by  plaques 
of  red,  white  and  blue,  and  the  latter  in- 
variably decorated  with  a  flag  and  flowers. 

Once  you  have  seen  these  graves  by  the 
roadside  going  east  you  will  hardly  go  a 
mile  in  two  hundred  which  has  not  its  graves. 
From  the  environs  of  Meaux,  a  scant  twenty 
miles  from  Paris,  to  the  frontier  at  the  Seille, 
beyond  Nancy,  there  are  graves  and  more 
graves,  now  scattered,  now  crowded  together 
where  men  fought  hand  to  hand.  Passing 
them  in  a  swift-moving  auto,  they  seem  to 
march  by  you;  there  is  the  illusion  of  an  army 
advancing  on  the  hillside,  until  at  last,  be- 
yond Nancy,  where  the  fighting  was  so  ter- 
rible, about  little  villages  such  as  Corbessaux, 
you  come  to  the  great  common  graves, 
where  a  hundred  or  two  hundred  men  have 
been  gathered,  where  the  trenches  now 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS  9 

levelled  are  but  long  graves,  and  you  read, 
"Here  rest  179  French  soldiers,"  or  across 
the  road,  "Here  196  Germans." 

Take  a  map  of  France  and  from  a  point 
just  south  of  Paris  draw  a  straight  line 
to  the  Vosges;  twenty  or  thirty  miles  to 
the  north  draw  another.  Between  the  two 
is  the  black  district  of  the  Marne  and  Nancy 
battles.  It  is  the  district  of  ruined  villages, 
destroyed  farms ;  it  is  the  region  where  every 
hillside — so  it  will  seem  to  the  traveller — 
is  marked  by  these  pathetic  crosses.  It  is  a 
region  in  which  the  sense  of  death  and  de- 
struction is  abroad.  Go  forty  miles  north 
again  and  draw  two  more  lines,  and  this  is 
the  region  not  of  the  death  and  destruction  of 
yesterday,  but  of  to-day;  this  is  the  front, 
where  the  graves  are  still  in  the  making,  the 
region  of  the  Oise  to  the  Meuse,  from  Noyon 
to  Verdun. 

On  this  day  our  route  led  eastward  through 
the  villages  which  in  September,  1914,  woke 
from  at  least  a  century  of  oblivion,  from  the 


10         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

forgetting  that  followed  Napoleon's  last 
campaign  in  France  to  a  splendid  but  terri- 
ble ten  days:  Courtacon,  Sezanne,  La-Fere 
Champenoise,  Vitry-le-Frangois,  the  region 
where  Franchet  d'Esperey  and  Foch  fought, 
where  the  "Miracle  of  the  Marne"  was  per- 
formed. Mile  after  mile  the  countryside 
files  by,  the  never-changing  impression  of  a 
huge  cemetery,  the  hugest  in  the  world,  the 
stricken  villages,  now  and  then  striving 
to  begin  again,  a  red  roof  here  and  there 
telling  of  the  first  counter  offensive  of  peace, 
of  construction  made  against  the  whirlwind 
that  had  come  and  gone. 

Always,  too,  nothing  but  old  men  and 
women,  these  and  children,  working  in  the 
broad  fields,  still  partially  cultivated,  but 
no  longer  the  fields  of  that  perfectly  cared  for 
France  of  the  other  peace  days.  Women 
and  children  at  the  plough,  old  men  bent 
double  by  age  still  spending  such  strength 
as  is  left  in  the  tasks  that  war  has  set  for 
them.  This  is  the  France  behind  the  front, 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS          11 

and,  aside  from  the  ruined  villages  and  graves, 
the  France  that  stretches  from  the  Pyrenees 
to  the  Marne,  a  France  from  which  youth 
and  manhood  are  gone,  in  which  age  and 
childhood  remain  with  the  women.  Yet  in 
this  land  we  were  passing  how  much  of  the 
youth  and  manhood  of  France  and  Germany 
was  buried  in  the  graves  the  crosses  demon- 
strated at  every  kilometre. 

But  a  hundred  miles  east  of  Paris  there 
begins  a  new  world.  The  graves,  the  shell- 
cursed  villages,  remain,  but  this  is  no  longer 
the  France  of  the  Marne  fighting  and  of  the 
war  of  two  years  ago.  At  Vitry-le-Frangois 
you  pass  almost  without  warning  into  the 
region  which  is  the  back  of  the  front  to-day, 
the  base  of  all  the  line  of  fire  from  Rheims 
to  the  Meuse,  and  suddenly  along  the  road 
appear  the  canvas  guideposts  which  bear  the 
terse  warning,  "Verdun."  You  pass  sud- 
denly from  ancient  to  contemporary  history, 
from  the  killing  of  other  years  to  the  killing 
that  is  of  to-day — the  killing  and  the  wound- 


12         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

ing — and  along  the  hills  where  there  are  still 
graves  there  begin  to  appear  Red  Cross 
tents  and  signs,  and  ambulances  pass  you 
bearing  the  latest  harvest. 

And  now  every  village  is  a  garrison  town. 
For  a  hundred  miles  there  have  been  only 
women  and  old  men,  but  now  there  are  only 
soldiers;  they  fill  the  streets;  they  crowd  the 
doorways  of  the  houses.  The  fields  are  filled 
with  tents,  with  horses,  with  all  the  impedi- 
menta of  an  army.  The  whole  countryside 
is  a  place  of  arms.  Every  branch  of  French 
service  is  about  you — Tunisians,  Turcos, 
cavalry,  the  black,  the  brown,  and  the  white 
— the  men  who  yesterday  or  last  week  were 
in  the  first  line,  who  rest  and  will  return 
to-morrow  or  next  day  to  fight  again. 

Unmistakably,  too,  you  feel  that  this 
is  the  business  of  war;  you  are  in  a  fac- 
tory, a  machine  shop;  if  the  product  is 
death  and  destruction,  it  is  no  less  a  matter 
of  machinery,  not  of  romance,  of  glamour. 
The  back  of  the  front  is  a  place  of  work 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS          13 

and  of  rest  for  more  work,  but  of  parade, 
of  the  brilliant,  of  the  fascinating  there 
is  just  nothing.  Men  with  bright  but 
plainly  weary  faces,  not  young  men,  but 
men  of  thirty  and  above,  hard  bitten  by 
their  experience,  patently  fit,  fed,  but  some- 
how related  to  the  ruins  and  the  destruction 
around  them,  they  are  all  about  you,  and 
wherever  now  you  see  a  grave  you  will  dis- 
cover a  knot  of  men  standing  before  it  talk- 
ing soberly.  Wherever  you  see  the  vestiges 
of  an  old  trench,  a  hill  that  was  fought  for 
at  this  time  twenty  months  ago,  you  will  see 
new  practice  trenches  and  probably  the  re- 
cruits, the  "Class  of  1917,"  the  boys  that 
are  waiting  for  the  call,  listening  to  an  officer 
explaining  to  them  what  has  been  done  here, 
the  mistake  or  the  good  judgment  revealed 
by  the  event.  For  France  is  training  the 
youth  that  remains  to  her  on  the  still  recent 
battlefields  and  in  the  presence  of  those  who 
died  to  keep  the  ground. 

Just  as  the  darkness  came  we  passed  St. 


14         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

Dizier  and  entered  at  last  upon  the  road  to 
Verdun,  the  one  road  that  is  the  life  line  of 
the  city.  For  to  understand  the  real  prob- 
lem of  the  defence  of  Verdun  you  must 
realize  that  there  is  lacking  to  the  city  any 
railroad.  In  September,  1914,  the  Germans 
took  St.  Mihiel  and  cut  the  railway  coming 
north  along  the  Meuse.  On  their  retreat 
from  the  Marne  the  soldiers  of  the  Crown 
Prince  halted  at  Montfaucon  and  Varennes, 
and  their  cannon  have  commanded  the  Paris- 
Verdun-Metz  Railroad  ever  since.  Save 
for  a  crazy  narrow-gauge  line  wandering 
along  the  hill  slopes,  climbing  by  impossible 
grades,  Verdun  is  without  rail  communica- 
tion. 

It  was  this  that  made  the  defence  of 
the  town  next  to  impossible.  Partially  to 
remedy  the  defect  the  French  had  recon- 
structed a  local  highway  running  from  St. 
Dizier  by  Bar-le-Duc  to  Verdun  beyond 
the  reach  of  German  artillery.  To-day  an 
army  of  a  quarter  of  a  million  of  men,  the 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS          15 

enormous  parks  of  heavy  artillery  and  field 
guns — everything  is  supplied  by  this  one  road 
and  by  motor  transport. 

Coming  north  from  St.  Dizier  we  entered 
this  vast  procession.  Mile  after  mile  the 
caravan  stretched  on,  fifty  miles  with  hardly 
a  break  of  a  hundred  feet  between  trucks. 
Paris  'buses,  turned  into  vehicles  to  bear 
fresh  meat;  new  motor  trucks  built  to  carry 
thirty-five  men  and  travelling  in  companies, 
regiments,  brigades;  wagons  from  the  hood 
of  which  soldiers,  bound  to  replace  the  killed 
and  wounded  of  yesterday,  looked  down  upon 
you,  calmly  but  unsmilingly.  From  St. 
Dizier  to  Verdun  the  impression  was  of 
that  of  the  machinery  by  which  logs  are 
carried  to  the  saw  in  a  mill.  You  felt  un- 
consciously, yet  unmistakably,  that  you 
were  looking,  not  upon  automobiles,  not 
upon  separate  trucks,  but  upon  some  vast 
and  intricate  system  of  belts  and  benches 
that  were  steadily,  swiftly,  surely  carry- 
ing all  this  vast  material,  carrying  men 


16         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

and  munitions  and  supplies,  everything 
human  and  inanimate,  to  that  vast  grind- 
ing mill  which  was  beyond  the  hills,  the 
crushing  machine  which  worked  with  equal 
remorselessness  upon  men  and  upon  things. 

Now  and  again,  too,  over  the  hills  came 
the  Red  Cross  ambulances;  they  passed 
you  returning  from  the  front  and  bring- 
ing within  their  carefully  closed  walls  the 
finished  product,  the  fruits  of  the  day's 
grinding,  or  a  fraction  thereof.  And  about 
the  whole  thing  there  was  a  sense  of  the 
mechanical  rather  than  the  human,  some- 
thing that  suggested  an  automatic,  a  ma- 
chine-driven, movement;  it  was  as  if  an 
unseen  system  of  belts  and  engines  and 
levers  guided,  moved,  propelled  this  long 
procession  upward  and  ever  toward  the  mys- 
terious front  where  the  knives  or  the  axes 
or  the  grinding  stones  did  their  work. 

Night  came  down  upon  us  along  the 
road  and  brought  a  new  impression.  Mile 
on  mile  over  the  hills  and  round  the  curves, 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS         17 

disappearing  in  the  woods,  reappearing  on 
the  distant  summits  of  the  hills,  each  show- 
ing a  rear  light  that  wagged  crazily  on  the 
horizon,  this  huge  caravan  flowed  onward, 
while  in  the  villages  and  on  the  hillsides 
campfires  flashed  up  and  the  faces  or  the 
figures  of  the  soldiers  could  be  seen  now 
clearly  and  now  dimly.  But  all  else  was 
subordinated  to  the  line  of  moving  transports. 
Somewhere  far  off  at  one  end  of  the  procession 
there  was  battle;  somewhere  down  below  at 
the  other  end  there  was  peace.  There  all 
the  resources,  the  life  blood,  the  treasure  in 
men  and  in  riches  of  France  were  concen- 
trating and  collecting,  were  being  fed  into 
this  motor  fleet,  which  like  baskets  on  ropes 
was  carrying  it  forward  to  the  end  of  the 
line  and  then  bringing  back  what  remained, 
or  for  the  most  part  coming  back  empty,  for 
more — for  more  lives  and  more  treasure. 

It  was  full  night  when  our  car  came 
down  the  curved  grades  into  Bar-le-Duc, 
halted  at  the  corner,  where  soldiers  per- 


18         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

formed  the  work  of  traffic  policemen  and 
steadily  guided  the  caravan  toward  the 
road  marked  by  a  canvas  sign  lighted  within 
by  a  single  candle  and  bearing  the  one  word, 
"Verdun."  All  night,  too,  the  rumble  of  the 
passing  transport  filled  the  air  and  the  little 
hotel  shook  with  the  jar  of  the  heavy  trucks, 
for  neither  by  day  nor  by  night  is  there  a 
halt  in  the  motor  transport,  and  the  sound 
of  this  grinding  is  never  low. 

It  was  little  more  than  daylight  when 
we  took  the  road  again,  with  a  thirty-mile 
drive  to  Verdun  before  us.  Almost  im- 
mediately we  turned  into  the  Verdun  route 
we  met  again  the  caravan  of  automobiles, 
of  camions,  as  the  French  say.  It  still 
flowed  on  without  break.  Now,  too,  we 
entered  the  main  road,  the  one  road  to 
Verdun,  the  road  that  had  been  built  by 
the  French  army  against  just  such  an  at- 
tack as  was  now  in  progress.  The  road 
was  as  wide  as  Fifth  Avenue,  as  smooth 
as  asphalt — a  roac)  that,  when  peace  comes, 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS          19 

if  it  ever  does,  will  delight  the  motorist. 
Despite  the  traffic  it  had  to  bear,  it  was 
in  perfect  repair,  and  soldiers  in  uniform 
sat  by  the  side  breaking  stone  and  pre- 
paring metal  to  keep  it  so. 

The  character  of  the  country  had  now 
changed.  We  were  entering  the  region  of 
the  hills,  between  the  Aisne  and  the  Meuse, 
a  country  reminiscent  of  New  England. 
Those  hills  are  the  barrier  which  beyond 
the  Meuse,  under  the  names  of  the  Cote 
de  Meuse,  have  been  the  scene  of  so  much 
desperate  fighting.  The  roads  that  sidled 
off  to  the  east  bore  battle  names,  St.  Mihiel, 
Troyon,  and  the  road  that  we  followed  was 
still  marked  at  every  turn  with  the  magic 
word  "Verdun."  Our  immediate  objective 
was  Souilly,  the  obscure  hill  town  twenty 
miles,  perhaps,  south  of  the  front,  from  which 
Sarrail  had  defended  Verdun  in  the  Marne 
days  and  from  which  Petain  was  now  de- 
fending Verdun  against  a  still  more  terrible 
attack. 


20         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

And  in  France  to-day  one  speaks  only 
of  Verdun  and  Petain.  Soldiers  have  their 
day;  Joffre,  Castelnau,  Foch,  all  retain 
much  of  the  affection  and  admiration  they 
have  deserved,  but  at  the  moment  it  is 
the  man  who  has  held  Verdun  that  France 
thinks  of,  and  there  was  the  promise  for 
us  that  at  Souilly  we  should  see  the  man 
whose  fame  had  filled  the  world  in  the 
recent  great  and  terrible  weeks.  Upward 
and  downward  over  the  hills,  through  more 
ruined  villages,  more  hospitals,  more  camps, 
our  march  took  us  until  after  a  short  hour 
we  came  to  Souilly,  general  headquarters  of 
the  Army  of  Verdun,  of  Petain,  the  centre 
of  the  world  for  the  moment. 

Few  towns  have  done  less  to  prepare  for 
greatness  than  Souilly.  It  boasts  a  single 
street  three  inches  deep  in  the  clay  mud 
of  the  spring — a  single  street  through  which 
the  Verdun  route  marches  almost  contemp- 
tuously, the  same  nest  of  stone  and  plaster 
houses,  one  story  high,  houses  from  which 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS         21 

the  owners  had  departed  to  make  room  for 
generals  and  staff  officers.  This  and  one 
thing  more,  the  Mairie,  the  town  hall,  as 
usual  the  one  pretentious  edifice  of  the  French 
hamlet,  and  before  the  stairway  of  this  we 
stopped  and  got  out. 

We  were  at  headquarters.  From  this 
little  building,  devoted  for  perhaps  a  cen- 
tury to  the  business  of  governing  the  com- 
mune of  Souilly,  with  its  scant  thousand 
of  people,  Petain  was  defending  Verdun 
and  the  fate  of  an  army  of  250,000  men 
at  the  least.  In  the  upstairs  room,  where 
the  town  councillors  had  once  debated 
parochial  questions,  Joffre  and  Castelnau 
and  Petain  in  the  terrible  days  of  the  open- 
ing conflict  had  consulted,  argued,  decided 
— decided  the  fate  of  France,  so  the  Ger- 
mans had  said,  for  they  had  made  the  fall 
of  Verdun  the  assurance  of  French  col- 
lapse. 

Unconsciously,  too,  you  felt  the  change 
in  the  character  of  the  population  of  this 


22         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

village.  There  were  still  the  soldiers,  the 
eternal  gray-blue  uniforms,  but  there  were 
also  men  of  a  different  type,  men  of  au- 
thority. In  the  street  your  guides  pointed 
out  to  you  General  Herr,  the  man  who  had 
designed  and  planned  and  accomplished 
the  miracle  of  the  motor  transport  that 
had  saved  Verdun — with  the  aid  of  the 
brave  men  fighting  somewhere  not  far  be- 
yond the  nearest  hills.  He  had  commanded 
at  Verdun  when  the  attack  came,  and  with- 
out hesitation  he  had  turned  over  his  com- 
mand to  Petain,  his  junior  in  service  and 
rank  before  the  war,  given  up  the  glory 
and  become  the  superintendent  of  trans- 
port. Men  spoke  to  you  of  the  fine  loyalty 
of  that  action  with  unconcealed  admira- 
tion. 

And  then  out  of  the  remoteness  of  Souilly 
there  came  a  voice  familiar  to  an  American. 
Bunau-Varilla,  the  man  of  Panama,  wearing 
the  uniform  of  a  commandant  and  the  Croix 
de  Guerre  newly  bestowed  for  some  wonderful 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS         23 

engineering  achievement,  stepped  forward 
to  ask  for  his  friends  and  yours  of  the  old 
''Sun  paper."  I  had  seen  him  last  in  the 
Sun  office  in  the  days  when  the  war  had 
just  broken  out  and  he  was  about  to  sail 
for  home;  in  the  days  when  the  Marne 
was  still  unfought  and  he  had  breathed 
hope  then  as  he  spoke  with  confidence 
now. 

Presently  there  arrived  the  two  officers 
whose  duty  it  was  to  take  me  to  Verdun, 
Captain  Henri  Bourdeaux,  a  man  of  let- 
ters known  to  all  Frenchmen;  Captain 
Madelin,  an  historian,  already  documented 
in  the  history  of  the  war  making  under 
his  own  eyes.  To  these  gentlemen  and  their 
colleagues  who  perform  this  task  that  can 
hardly  be  agreeable,  who  risk  their  lives  and 
give  over  their  time  with  unfailing  courtesy 
and  consideration  that  the  American  news- 
paper correspondent  may  see,  may  report, 
it  is  impossible  to  return  sufficient  thanks, 
and  every  American  newspaper  reader  who 


24         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

finds  on  his  breakfast  table  the  journal  that 
tells  him  of  the  progress  of  the  war  owes 
something  to  some  officer. 

"Were  we  to  see  Verdun?"  This  was 
the  first  problem.  I  had  been  warned  two 
days  before  that  the  bombardment  was 
raging  and  that  it  was  quite  possible  that 
it  would  be  unsafe  to  go  farther.  But  the 
news  was  reassuring;  Verdun  was  tran- 
quil. "And  Petain?"  One  could  not  yet 
say. 

Even  as  we  spoke  there  was  a  stirring 
in  the  crowd,  general  saluting,  and  I  caught 
a  glimpse  of  the  commander-in-chief  as  he 
went  quickly  up  the  staircase.  For  the  rest 
we  must  wait.  But  not  for  very  long;  in  a 
few  minutes  there  came  the  welcome  word 
that  General  Petain  would  see  us,  would  see 
the  stray  American  correspondent. 

Since  I  saw  Petain  in  the  little  Mairie 
at  Souilly  I  have  seen  many  photographs 
of  him,  but  none  in  any  real  measure  give 
the  true  picture  of  the  defender  of  Verdun. 


25 

He  saw  us  in  his  office,  the  bare  upstairs 
room,  two  years  ago  the  office  of  the  Mayor  of 
Souilly.  Think  of  the  Selectmen's  office  in 
any  New  England  village  and  the  picture 
will  be  accurate:  a  bare  room,  a  desk,  one 
chair,  a  telephone,  nothing  on  the  walls  but 
two  maps,  one  of  the  military  zone,  one  of  the 
actual  front  and  positions  of  the  Verdun 
fighting.  A  bleak  room,  barely  heated  by 
the  most  primitive  of  stoves.  From  the 
single  window  one  looked  down  on  the  cheer- 
less street  along  which  lumberec?  the  caravan 
of  autos.  On  the  pegs  against  the  wall 
hung  the  General's  hat  and  coat,  weather- 
stained,  faded,  the  clothes  of  a  man  who 
worked  in  all  weathers.  Of  staff  officers, 
of  uniforms,  of  color  there  was  just  noth- 
ing; of  war  there  was  hardly  a  hint. 

At  the  door  the  commander-in-chief  met 
us,  shook  hands,  and  murmured  clearly  and 
slowly,  with  incisive  distinctness,  the  for- 
mal words  of  French  greeting;  he  spoke 
no  English.  Instantly  there  was  the  sug- 


26         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

gestion  of  Kitchener,  not  of  Kitchener  as 
you  see  him  in  flesh,  but  in  photographs, 
the  same  coldness,  decision.  The  smile 
that  accompanied  the  words  of  welcome 
vanished  and  the  face  was  utterly  motion- 
less, expressionless.  You  saw  a  tall,  broad- 
shouldered  man,  with  every  appearance  of 
physical  strength,  a  clear  blue  eye,  looking 
straight  forward  and  beyond. 

My  French  companion,  M.  Le  Roux,  spoke 
with  Petain.  He  had  just  come  from  Joffre 
and  he  told  an  interestii.j  circumstance. 
Petain  listened.  He  said  now  and  then 
"yes"  or  "no."  Nothing  more.  Watching 
him  narrowly  you  saw  that  occasionally  his 
eyes  twitched  a  little,  the  single  sign  of 
fatigue  that  the  long  strain  of  weeks  of  re- 
sponsibility had  brought. 

It  was  hard  to  believe,  looking  at  this 
quiet,  calm,  silent  man,  that  you  were  in 
the  presence  of  the  soldier  who  had  won 
the  Battle  of  Champagne,  the  man  whom 
the  war  had  surprised  in  the  last  of  his 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS          27 

fifties,  a  Colonel,  a  teacher  of  war  rather 
than  a  soldier,  a  professor  like  Foch. 

No  one  of  Napoleon's  marshals  had  com- 
manded as  many  men  as  obeyed  this  French- 
man, who  was  as  lacking  in  the  distinction 
of  military  circumstance  as  our  own  Grant. 
Napoleon  had  won  all  his  famous  victories 
with  far  fewer  troops  than  were  directed 
from  the  telephone  on  the  table  yonder. 

Every  impression  of  modern  war  that 
comes  to  one  actually  in  touch  with  it  is  a 
destruction  of  illusion:  this  thing  is  a  thing 
of  mechanism  rather  than  of  brilliance; 
perhaps  Petain  has  led  a  regiment,  a  brigade, 
or  a  division  to  the  charge.  You  knew  in- 
stinctively in  seeing  the  man  that  you  would 
go  or  come,  as  he  said,  but  there  was  neither 
dash  nor  fire,  nothing  of  the  suggestion  of 
elan;  rather  there  was  the  suggestion  of  the 
commander  of  a  great  ocean  liner,  the  man 
responsible  for  the  lives,  this  time  of  hundreds 
of  thousands,  not  scores,  for  the  safety  of 
France,  not  of  a  ship,  but  the  man  of  ma- 


28         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

chinery  and  the  master  of  the  wisdom  of  the 
tides  and  the  weather,  not  the  Ney,  or  the 
Murat,  not  the  Napoleon  of  Arcola.  The 
impression  was  of  a  strong  man  whose  life 
was  a  life  beaten  upon  by  storms;  the  man 
on  the  bridge,  to  keep  to  the  rather  ridicu- 
lously inadequate  figure,  but  not  by  any 
chance  the  man  on  horseback. 

My  talk,  our  talk  with  Petain  was  the 
matter  of  perhaps  five  minutes.  The  time 
was  consumed  by  the  words  of  M.  Le  Roux, 
who  spoke  very  earnestly  urging  that  more 
American  correspondents  be  permitted  to 
visit  Verdun,  and  Petain  heard  him  patiently, 
but  said  just  nothing.  Once  he  had  greeted 
us  his  face  settled  into  that  grim  expression 
that  never  changed  until  he  smiled  his  word 
of  good  wishes  as  we  left.  Yet  I  have  since 
found  that  apart  from  one  circumstance  which 
I  shall  mention  in  a  moment  I  have  remem- 
bered those  minutes  most  clearly  of  all  of 
my  Verdun  experience.  Just  as  the  photo- 
graph does  not  reveal  the  face  of  the  man,  the 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS         29 

word  does  not  describe  the  sense  of  strength, 
of  responsibility,  that  he  gives. 

In  a  childish  sort  of  way,  exactly  as  one 
thinks  of  war  as  a  matter  of  dash  and  color 
and  motion,  one  thinks  of  the  French  general 
as  the  leader  of  a  cavalry  charge  or  of  a  for- 
lorn hope  of  infantry.  And  the  French 
soldier  of  this  war  has  not  been  the  man  of 
charge  or  of  dash — not  that  he  has  not 
charged  as  well  as  ever  in  his  history,  a  little 
more  bravely,  perhaps,  for  machine  guns  are 
new  and  something  worse  than  other  wars 
have  had.  What  the  French  soldier  has 
done  has  been  to  stand,  to  hold,  to  die  not 
in  the  onrush  but  on  the  spot. 

And  Petain  in  some  curious  way  has 
fixed  in  my  mind  the  impression  of  the  new 
Frenchman,  if  there  be  a  new  one,  or  per- 
haps better  of  the  French  soldier  of  to-day, 
whether  he  wear  the  stars  of  the  general  or 
undecorated  "horizon"  blue  of  the  Poilu. 
The  look  that  I  saw  in  his  eyes,  the  calm, 
steady,  utterly  emotionless  looking  straight 


30         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

forward,  I  saw  everywhere  at  the  front  and 
at  the  back  of  the  front.  It  embodied  for 
me  an  enduring  impression  of  the  spirit  and 
the  poise  of  the  French  soldier  of  the  latest 
and  most  terrible  of  French  struggles.  And 
I  confess  that,  more  than  all  I  saw  and  heard 
at  the  front  and  in  Paris,  the  look  of  this 
man  convinced  me  that  Verdun  would  not 
fall,  that  France  herself  would  not  either 
weary  or  weaken. 

In  Paris,  where  one  may  hear  anything, 
there  are  those  that  will  tell  you  that  Joffre's 
work  is  done  and  that  France  waits  for  the 
man  who  will  complete  the  task;  that  the 
strain  of  the  terrible  months  has  wearied  the 
general  who  won  the  Battle  of  the  Marne 
and  saved  France.  They  will  tell  you, 
perhaps,  that  Petain  is  the  man;  they  will 
certainly  tell  you  that  they  hope  that  the 
man  has  been  found  in  Petain.  As  to  the 
truth  of  all  this  I  do  not  pretend  to  know.  I 
did  not  see  Joffre,  but  all  that  I  have  read  of 
Joffre  suggests  that  Petain  is  of  his  sort,  the 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS         31 

same  quiet,  silent  man,  with  a  certain  cold- 
ness of  the  North,  a  grimness  of  manner  that 
is  lacking  in  his  chief. 

There  was  a  Kitchener  legend  in  Europe, 
and  I  do  not  think  it  survives  save  a  little 
perhaps  in  corners  of  England.  There  was 
a  legend  of  a  man  of  ice  and  of  iron,  a  man 
who  made  victory  out  of  human  material  as 
a  man  makes  a  wall  of  mortar  and  stone,  a 
man  to  whom  his  material  was  only  mortar 
and  stone,  even  though  it  were  human.  This 
legend  has  perished  so  far  as  Kitchener  is 
concerned,  gone  with  so  much  that  England 
trusted  and  believed  two  years  ago,  but  I 
find  myself  thinking  now  of  Petain  as  we  all 
thought  of  Kitchener  in  his  great  day. 

If  I  were  an  officer  I  should  not  like  to 
come  to  the  defender  of  Verdun  with  the 
confession  of  failure.  I  think  I  should  rather 
meet  the  Bavarians  in  the  first  line  trenches, 
but  I  should  like  to  know  that  when  I  was 
obeying  orders  I  was  carrying  out  a  minor 
detail  of  something  Petain  had  planned;  I 


32         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

should  expect  it  to  happen,  the  thing  that  he 
had  arranged,  and  I  should  feel  that  those 
clear,  steel-blue  eyes  had  foreseen  all  that 
could  occur,  foreseen  calmly  and  utterly, 
whether  it  entailed  the  death  of  one  or  a 
thousand  men,  of  ten  thousand  men  if  nec- 
essary, and  had  willed  that  it  should  happen. 

I  do  not  believe  Napoleon's  Old  Guard 
would  have  followed  Petain  as  they  followed 
Ney.  I  cannot  fancy  him  in  the  Imperial 
uniform,  and  yet,  now  that  war  is  a  thing  of 
machines,  of  telephones,  of  indirect  fire  and 
destruction  from  unseen  weapons  at  remote 
ranges,  now  that  the  whole  manner  and  cir- 
cumstance of  conflict  have  changed,  it  is  but 
natural  that  the  General  should  change,  too. 
Patently  Petain  is  of  the  new,  not  the  old, 
but  no  less  patently  he  was  the  master  of 
it. 

We  left  the  little  Mairie,  entered  our 
machines  and  slid  out  swiftly  for  the  last 
miles,  climbed  and  curved  over  the  final 
hill  and  suddenly  looked  down  on  a  deep, 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS         33 

trenchlike  valley  marching  from  east  to 
west  and  carrying  the  Paris-Verdun-Metz 
Railroad,  no  longer  available  for  traffic.  And 
as  we  coasted  down  the  hill  we  heard  the 
guns  at  last,  not  steadily,  but  only  from  time 
to  time,  a  distant  boom,  a  faint  billowing  up 
of  musketry  fire.  Some  three  or  four  miles 
straight  ahead  there  were  the  lines  of  fire 
beyond  the  brown  hills  that  flanked  the 
valley. 

At  the  bottom  of  the  valley  we  turned 
east,  moved  on  for  a  mile,  and  stopped 
abruptly.  The  guns  were  sounding  more 
clearly,  and  suddenly  there  was  a  sense  not 
of  soldiers,  but  of  an  army.  On  one  side 
of  the  road  a  column  was  coming  toward 
us,  a  column  of  men  who  were  leaving  the 
trenches  for  a  rest,  the  men  who  for  the 
recent  days  had  held  the  first  line.  Wear- 
ily but  steadily  they  streamed  by;  the  mud 
of  the  trenches  covered  their  tunics;  here 
and  there  a  man  had  lost  his  steel  helmet 
and  wore  a  handkerchief  about  his  head, 


34         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

probably  to  conceal  a  slight  wound  that 
but  for  the  helmet  had  killed  him. 

These  men  were  smiling  as  they  marched; 
they  carried  their  full  equipment  and  it 
rattled  and  tinkled;  they  carried  their  guns 
at  all  angles,  they  wore  their  uniforms  in 
the  strangest  of  disorders;  they  seemed  al- 
most like  miners  coming  from  the  depths 
of  the  earth  rather  than  soldiers  returning 
from  a  decisive  battle,  from  the  hell  of  mod- 
ern shell  fire. 

But  it  was  the  line  on  the  other  side  of 
the  road  that  held  the  eye.  Here  were  the 
troops  that  were  going  toward  the  fire, 
toward  the  trenches,  that  were  marching 
to  the  sound  of  the  guns,  and  as  one  saw 
them  the  artillery  rumble  took  on  a  new 
distinctness. 

Involuntarily  I  searched  the  faces  of  these 
men  as  they  passed.  They  were  hardly 
ten  feet  from  me.  Platoon  after  platoon, 
company  after  company,  whole  regiments  in 
columns  of  fours.  And  seeing  the  faces 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS          35 

brought  an  instant  shock;  they  all  wore  the 
same  calm,  steady,  slightly  weary  expression, 
but  there  was  in  the  whole  line  scarcely  a 
young  man.  Here  were  men  of  the  thirties, 
not  the  twenties;  men  still  in  the  prime  of 
strength,  of  health,  but  the  fathers  of  families, 
the  men  of  full  manhood. 

Almost  in  a  flash  the  fact  came  home. 
This  was  what  all  the  graves  along  the 
road  had  meant.  This  was  what  the  bat- 
tlefields and  the  glories  of  the  twenty  months 
had  spelled — France  had  sent  her  youth  and 
it  was  spent;  she  was  sending  her  manhood 
now. 

In  the  line  no  man  smiled  and  no  man 
straggled;  the  ranks  were  closed  up  and 
there  were  neither  commands  nor  any  visi- 
ble sign  of  authority.  These  men  who  were 
marching  to  the  sound  of  the  guns  had 
been  there  before.  They  knew  precisely 
what  it  meant.  Yet  you  could  not  but  feel 
that  as  they  went  a  little  wearily,  sadly, 
they  marched  willingly.  They  would  not 


36         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

have  it  otherwise.  Their  faces  were  the 
faces  of  men  who  had  taken  the  full  measure 
of  their  own  fate. 

You  had  a  sense  of  the  loathing,  the 
horror,  above  all  the  sadness  that  was  in 
their  hearts  that  this  thing,  this  war,  this 
destruction  had  to  be.  They  had  come  back 
here  through  all  the  waste  of  ruined  villages 
and  shell-torn  hillsides;  all  the  men  that  you 
saw  would  not  measure  the  cost  of  a  single 
hour  of  trench  fighting  if  the  real  attack 
began.  This  these  men  knew,  and  the  mes- 
sage of  the  artillery  fire,  which  was  only 
one  of  unknown  terrors  for  you,  was  intelli- 
gible to  the  utmost  to  each  of  them. 

And  yet  with  the  weariness  there  was  a 
certain  resignation,  a  certain  patience,  a 
certain  sense  of  comprehending  sacrifice 
that  more  than  all  else  is  France  to-day, 
the  true  France.  This,  and  not  the  empty 
forts,  not  even  the  busy  guns,  was  the  wall 
that  defended  France,  this  line  of  men.  If 
it  broke  there  would  come  thundering  down 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS         37 

again  out  of  the  north  all  the  tornado  of 
destruction  that  had  turned  Northeastern 
France  into  a  waste  place  and  wrecked  so 
much  of  the  world's  store  of  the  beautiful 
and  the  inspiring. 

Somehow  you  felt  that  this  was  in  the 
minds  of  all  these  men.  They  had  willed  to 
die  that  France  might  live.  They  were  go- 
ing to  a  death  that  sounded  ever  more 
clearly  as  they  marched.  This  death  had 
eaten  up  all  that  was  young,  most  of  what 
was  young  at  the  least,  of  France;  it  might 
yet  consume  France,  and  so  these  men 
marched  to  the  sound  of  the  guns,  not  to 
martial  music,  not  with  any  suggestion  of 
dash,  of  enthusiasm,  but  quietly,  steadily, 
.'ill  with  the  same  look  upon  their  faces — 
the  look  of  men  who  have  seen  death  and 
are  to  see  it  again.  Instinctively  I  thought 
of  what  Kipling  had  said  to  me  in  London: 

"Somewhere  over  there,"  he  had  said, 
"the  thing  will  suddenly  grip  your  throat 
and  your  heart;  it  will  take  hold  of  you 


38         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

as  nothing  in  your  life  has  ever  done  or 
ever  will."  And  I  know  that  I  never  shall 
forget  those  lines  of  quiet,  patient,  middle- 
aged  men  marching  to  the  sound  of  the  guns, 
leaving  at  their  backs  the  countless  graves 
that  hold  the  youth  of  France,  the  men  who 
had  known  the  Marne,  the  Yser,  Champagne, 
who  had  known  death  for  nearly  two  years, 
night  and  day,  almost  constantly.  Yet 
during  the  fifteen  minutes  I  watched  there 
was  not  one  order,  not  one  straggler;  there 
Was  a  sense  of  the  regularity  with  which  the 
blood  flows  through  the  human  arteries  in 
this  tide,  and  it  was  the  blood  of  France. 

So  many  people  have  asked  me,  I  had 
asked  myself,  the  question  before  I  went 
to  France:  "Are  they  not  weary  of  it?  Will 
the  French  not  give  up  from  sheer  exhaustion 
of  strength?"  I  do  not  think  so,  now  that 
I  have  seen  the  faces  of  these  hundreds  of 
men  as  they  marched  to  the  trenches  beyond 
Verdun.  France  may  bleed  to  death,  but  I 
do  not  think  that  while  there  are  men  there 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS          39 

will  be  an  end  of  the  sacrifice.  No  pen  or 
voice  can  express  the  horror  that  these  men, 
that  all  Frenchmen,  have  of  this  war,  of  all 
war,  the  weariness.  They  hate  it;  you  cannot 
mistake  this;  but  France  marches  to  the 
frontier  in  the  spirit  that  men  manned  the 
walls  against  the  barbarians  in  the  other 
days;  there  is  no  other  way;  it  must  be. 

Over  and  over  again  there  has  come  the 
invariable  answer;  it  would  have  come  from 
scores  and  hundreds  of  these  men  who  passed 
so  near  me  I  could  have  touched  their  faded 
uniforms  if  I  had  asked — "It  is  for  France, 
for  civilization;  it  must  be,  for  there  is  no 
other  way;  we  shall  die,  but  with  us,  with  our 
sacrifice,  perhaps  this  thing  will  end."  You 
cannot  put  it  in  words  quite,  I  do  not  think 
even  any  Frenchman  has  quite  said  it,  but  you 
can  see  it,  you  can  feel  it,  you  can  under- 
stand it,  when  you  see  a  regiment,  a  bri- 
gade, a  division  of  these  men  of  thirty,  some 
perhaps  of  forty,  going  forward  to  the  war 
they  hate  and  will  never  quiet  until  that 


40         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

which  they  love  is  safe  or  they  and  all  of  their 
race  are  swallowed  up  in  the  storm  that  now 
was  audibly  beating  beyond  the  human  walls 
on  the  nearby  hillsides. 

Presently  we  moved  again,  we  slipped 
through  the  column,  topped  the  last  incline, 
shot  under  the  crumbling  gate  of  the  Verdun 
fortress,  and  as  we  entered  a  shell  burst  just 
behind  us  and  the  roar  drowned  out  all  else 
in  its  sudden  and  paralyzing  crash.  It  had 
fallen,  so  we  learned  a  little  later,  just  where 
we  had  been  watching  the  passing  troops; 
it  had  fallen  among  them  and  killed.  But 
an  hour  or  two  later,  when  we  repassed  the 
point  where  it  fell,  men  were  still  marching 
by.  Other  regiments  of  men  were  still  march- 
ing to  the  sound  of  the  guns,  and  those  who 
had  passed  were  already  over  the  hills  and 
beyond  the  river,  filing  into  the  trenches  in 
time,  so  it  turned  out,  to  meet  the  new  at- 
tack that  came  with  the  later  afternoon. 

I  went  to  Verdun  to  see  the  forts,  the  city, 
the  hills,  and  the  topography  of  a  great  bat- 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS         41 ' 

tie;  I  went  in  the  hope  of  describing  with  a 
little  of  clarity  what  the  operation  meant  as 
a  military  affair.  I  say,  and  I  shall  hereafter 
try  to  describe  this.  But  I  shall  never  be 
able  to  describe  this  thing  which  was  the 
true  Verdun  for  me — these  men,  their  faces, 
seen  as  one  heard  the  shell  fire  and  the 
musketry  rolling,  not  steadily  but  inter- 
mittently, the  men  who  had  marched  over 
the  roads  that  are  lined  with  graves,  through 
villages  that  are  destroyed,  who  had  come  of 
their  own  will  and  in  calm  determination  and 
marched  unhurryingly  and  yet  unshrink- 
ingly, the  men  who  were  no  longer  young, 
who  had  left  behind  them  all  that  men 
hold  dear  in  life,  home,  wives,  children, 
because  they  knew  that  there  was  no  other 
way. 

I  can  only  say  to  all  those  who  have  asked 
me,  "What  of  France?"  this  simple  thing, 
that  I  do  not  believe  the  French  will  ever 
stop.  I  do  not  believe,  as  the  Germans  have 
said,  that  French  courage  is  weakening,  that 


42         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

French  determination  is  abating.  I  do  not 
believe  the  Kaiser  himself  would  think  this 
if  he  had  seen  these  men's  faces  as  they 
marched  toward  his  guns.  I  think  he  would 
feel  as  I  felt,  as  one  must  feel,  that  these  men 
went  willingly,  hating  war  with  their  whole 
soul,  destitute  of  passion  or  anger.  I  never 
heard  a  passionate  word  in  France,  be- 
cause there  had  entered  into  their  minds, 
into  the  mind  and  heart  of  a  whole  race, 
the  belief  that  what  was  at  stake  was  the 
thing  that  for  two  thousand  years  of  his- 
tory had  been  France. 


II 

MY    TRIP    TO    VERDUN— A    DYING, 
SHELL-RIDDEN  CITY 

THE   VATJBAN    CITADEL,    IN    THE   SHELTER    OF 
WHICH  FALLING  SHELLS  CANNOT  FIND  YOU 
— HOUSES  AND  BLOCKS  THAT  ARE  VAN- 
ISHING HOURLY — "BUT  WILLIAM  WILL 
NOT   COME" — WAR   THAT   IS  INVISI- 
BLE— A  LUNCHEON  UNDERGROUND 

WITH  A  TOAST  TO  AMERICA THE 

LAST   COURTESY  FROM  A  GEN- 
ERAL  AND    A    HOST — NOTH- 
ING     THAT     WAS      NOT 
BEAUTIFUL 

THE  citadel  of  Verdun,  the  bulwark  of 
the  eastern  frontier  in  ancient  days, 
rises  out  of  the  meadows  of  the  Meuse 
with  something  of  the  abruptness  of  the  sky- 
scraper, and  still  preserves  that  aspect  which 
led  the  writers  of  other  wars  to  describe  all 

43 


44          THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

forts  as  "frowning."  It  was  built  for  Louis 
XIV  by  Vauban.  He  took  a  solid  rock  and 
blasted  out  redoubts  and  battlements.  The 
generations  that  followed  him  dug  into  the 
living  rock  and  created  within  it  a  whole 
city  of  catacombs,  a  vast  labyrinth  of  passages 
and  chambers  and  halls;  even  an  elevator 
was  added  by  the  latest  engineers,  so  that 
one  can  go  from  floor  to  floor,  from  the  level 
of  the  meadow  to  the  level  of  the  summit  of 
the  rock,  possibly  a  hundred  feet  above. 

By  reason  of  the  fact  that  many  corre- 
spondents have  visited  this  fortress  since  the 
war  began  the  world  has  come  to  know  of  the 
underground  life  in  Verdun,  to  think  of  the 
city  as  defended  by  some  wonderful  system 
of  subterranean  works;  to  think  of  Verdun, 
in  fact,  as  a  city  or  citadel  that  is  defensible 
either  by  walls  or  by  forts.  But  the  truth 
is  far  different:  even  the  old  citadel  is  but  a 
deserted  cave;  its  massive  walls  of  natural 
rock  resist  the  shells  as  they  would  repulse 
an  avalanche;  but  the  guns  that  were  once 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS          45 

on  its  parapets  are  gone,  the  garrison  is  gone, 
gone  far  out  on  the  trench  lines  beyond  the 
hills.  The  Vauban  citadel  is  now  a  place 
where  bread  is  baked,  where  wounded  men 
are  occasionally  brought,  where  live  the 
soldiers  and  officers  whose  important  but 
unromantic  mission  it  is  to  keep  the  roads 
through  the  town  open,  to  police  the  ashes  of 
the  city,  to  do  what  remains  of  the  work  that 
once  fell  to  the  lot  of  the  civil  authorities. 

To  glide  swiftly  to  the  shelter  of  this  rock 
from  a  region  in  which  a  falling  shell  has 
served  to  remind  you  of  the  real  meaning  of 
Verdun  of  the  moment,  to  leave  the  automo- 
bile and  plunge  into  the  welcome  obscurity 
of  this  cavern — this  was  perhaps  the  most 
comfortable  personal  incident  of  the  day. 
The  mere  shadow  of  the  rock  gave  a  sense  of 
security ;  to  penetrate  it  was  to  pass  to  safety. 

Some  moments  of  wandering  by  corridors 
and  stairways  into  the  very  heart  of  the  rock 
brought  us  to  the  quarters  of  our  host,  Gen- 
eral Dubois;  to  his  kind  attention  I  was  to 


46         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

owe  all  my  good  fortune  in  seeing  his  dying 
city;  to  him,  at  the  end,  I  was  to  owe  the  ulti- 
mate evidence  of  courtesy,  which  I  shall  never 
forget. 

Unlike  Petain  or  Joffre,  General  Dubois 
is  a  little  man,  possibly  a  trifle  older  than 
either.  A  white-haired,  bright-eyed,  vigor 
ous  soldier,  who  made  his  real  fame  in  Mada- 
gascar with  Joffre  and  with  Gallieni,  and 
when  the  storm  broke  was  sent  to  Verdun 
by  these  men,  who  knew  him,  to  do  the  diffi- 
cult work  that  there  was  to  be  performed 
behind  the  battle  line.  There  is  about  Gen- 
eral Dubois  a  suggestion  of  the  old,  as  well 
as  the  new,  of  the  French  general.  The  pri- 
vate soldiers  to  whom  he  spoke  as  he  went 
his  rounds  responded  with  a  "Oui,  mon 
General"  that  had  a  note  of  affection  as  well 
as  of  discipline;  he  was  rather  as  one  fancied 
were  the  soldiers  of  the  Revolution,  of  the 
Empire,  of  the  Algerian  days  of  Pere  Bugeaud 
whose  memory  is  still  green. 

Our  salutations  made,  we  returned  through 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS         47 

the  winding  corridors  to  inspect  the  bakeries, 
the  water  and  light  plant,  the  unsuspected 
resources  of  this  rock.  In  one  huge  cavern 
we  saw  the  men  who  provided  30,000  men 
with  bread  each  day,  men  working  as  the 
stokers  in  an  ocean  steamer  labor  amidst  the 
glare  of  fires;  we  tasted  the  bread  and  found 
it  good,  as  good  as  all  French  bread  is,  and 
that  means  a  little  better  than  all  other 
bread. 

Then  we  slipped  back  into  daylight  and 
wandered  along  the  face  of  the  fortress. 
We  inspected  shell  holes  of  yesterday  and 
of  last  month;  we  inspected  them  as  one  in- 
spects the  best  blossoms  in  a  garden;  we 
studied  the  angle  at  which  they  dropped; 
we  measured  the  miniature  avalanche  that 
they  brought  with  them.  But  always,  so 
far,  there  was  the  subconscious  sense  of 
the  rock  between  us  and  the  enemy.  I  never 
before  understood  the  full  meaning  of  that 
phrase  "a  rock  in  a  weary  land." 

All    this    was   but   preliminary,    however. 


48         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

Other  automobiles  arrived;  the  General  en- 
tered one.  I  followed  in  the  next  and  we 
set  out  to  visit  Verdun,  to  visit  the  ruins, 
or,  rather,  to  see  not  a  city  that  was  dead, 
but  a  city  that  was  visibly,  hourly  dying — 
a  city  that  was  vanishing  by  blocks  and 
by  squares — but  was  not  yet  fallen  to  the 
estate  of  Ypres  or  Arras;  a  city  that  in  cor- 
ners, where  there  were  gardens  behind  the 
walls,  still  smiled;  a  city  where  some  few 
brave  old  buildings  still  stood  four  square 
and  solid,  but  only  waiting  what  was  to 
come. 

Before  I  visited  Verdun  I  had  seen  many 
cities  and  towns  which  had  been  wholly  or 
partially  destroyed,  either  by  shell  fire  or  by 
the  German  soldiers  in  their  great  invasion 
before  the  Marne.  One  shelled  town  is  much 
like  another,  and  there  is  no  thrill  quite  like 
that  you  experience  when  you  see  the  first. 
But  these  towns  had  died  nearly  two  years 
ago;  indeed,  in  most  the  resurrection  had 
begun :  little  red  roofs  were  beginning  to  shine 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS         49 

through  the  brown  trees  and  stark  ruins. 
Children  played  again  in  the  squares.  It  was 
like  the  sense  you  have  when  you  see  an  old 
peasant  ploughing  among  the  cross-marked 
graves  of  a  hard-fought  battle  corner — the 
sense  of  a  beginning  as  well  as  of  death  and 
destruction. 

But  at  Verdun  it  was  utterly  different. 
Of  life,  or  people,  of  activity  beginning 
again  or  surviving  there  was  nothing.  Some 
time  in  the  recent  past  all  the  little  people 
who  lived  in  these  houses  had  put  upon  wag- 
ons what  could  be  quickly  moved  and  had 
slipped  out  of  their  home,  that  was  already 
under  sentence  of  death.  They  were  gone 
into  the  distance,  and  they  had  left  behind 
them  no  stragglers.  The  city  was  empty  save 
for  a  few  soldiers  who  passed  rapidly  along 
the  streets,  as  one  marches  in  a  heavy  snow- 
storm. 

Yet  Verdun  was  not  wholly  dead.  Shell 
fire  is  the  most  inexplicable  of  all  things 
that  carry  destruction.  As  you  passed  down 


50         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

one  street  the  mark  of  destruction  varied 
with  each  house.  Here  the  blast  had  come 
and  cut  the  building  squarely;  it  had  carried 
with  it  into  ruin  behind  in  the  courtyard  all 
that  the  house  contained,  but  against  the  wall 
the  telephone  rested  undisturbed;  pictures 
—possibly  even  a  looking  glass — hung  as  the 
inhabitants  had  left  it,  hung  as  perhaps  it 
had  hung  when  the  last  woman  had  taken  her 
ultimate  hurried  glance  at  her  hat  before 
she  departed  into  the  outer  darkness. 

But  the  next  house  had  lost  only  the 
front  walls;  it  stood  before  you  as  if  it  had 
been  opened  for  your  inspection  by  the  re- 
moval of  the  fagade.  Chairs,  beds — all  the 
domestic  economy  of  the  house — sagged 
visibly  outward  toward  the  street,  or  stood 
still  firm,  but  open  to  the  four  winds.  It  was 
as  if  the  scene  were  prepared  for  a  stage  and 
you  sat  before  the  footlights  looking  into  the 
interior.  Again,  the  next  house  and  that 
beyond  were  utterly  gone — side  walls,  front 
walls,  everything  swallowed  up  and  van- 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS         51 

ished — the  iron  work  twisted  into  heaps,  the 
stone  work  crumbled  to  dust;  the  whole  mass 
of  ruin  still  smoked,  for  it  was  a  shell  of  yester- 
day that  had  done  this  work. 

Down  on  the  Riviera,  where  the  mistral 
blows- — all  the  pine  trees  lean  away  from 
the  invariable  track  of  this  storm  wind— 
you  have  the  sense,  even  in  the  summer 
months,  of  a  whole  countryside  bent  by 
the  gales.  In  the  same  fashion  you  felt 
in  Verdun,  felt  rather  than  saw,  a  whole 
town  not  bent,  but  crumbled,  crushed — and 
the  line  of  fall  was  always  apparent;  you 
could  tell  the  direction  from  which  each 
storm  of  shells  had  come,  you  could  almost 
feel  that  the  storm  was  but  suspended,  not 
over,  that  at  any  moment  it  might  begin 
again. 

Yet  even  in  the  midst  of  destruction 
there  were  enclaves  of  unshaken  structures. 
On  the  Rue  Mazel,  "Main  Street,"  the 
chief  clothing  store  rose  immune  amid  ashes 
on  all  sides.  Its  huge  plate-glass  window 


52          THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

was  not  even  cracked.  And  behind  the  win- 
dow a  little  mannikin,  one  of  the  familiar 
images  that  wear  clothes  to  tempt  the  pur- 
chaser, stood  erect.  A  French  soldier  had 
crept  in  and  raised  the  stiff  arm  of  the  manni- 
kin to  the  salute,  pushed  back  the  hat  to  a 
rakish  angle.  The  mannikin  seemed  alive 
and  more  than  alive,  the  embodiment  of  the 
spirit  of  the  place.  Facing  northward  toward 
the  German  guns  it  seemed  to  respond  to 
them  with  a  "  morituri  salutamus"  "  The  last 
civilian  in  Verdun,"  the  soldiers  called  him, 
but  his  manner  was  rather  that  of  the  Poilu. 
We  crossed  the  river  and  the  canal  and 
stopped  by  the  ruin  of  what  had  once  been 
a  big  factory  or  warehouse.  We  crawled 
through  an  open  shell-made  breach  in  the 
brick  wall  and  stood  in  the  interior.  The 
ashes  were  still  hot,  and  in  corners  there 
were  smoking  fires.  Two  days  ago,  at  just 
this  time,  your  guides  told  you,  men  had  been 
working  here;  making  bread,  I  think.  At  the 
same  time  we  had  come  to  the  ruins — the 


53 

same  time  of  day,  that  Is — the  Germans  had 
dropped  a  half-dozen  incendiary  shells  into 
the  building  and  it  had  burned  in  ten  min- 
utes. Most  of  the  men  who  had  been  there 
then  were  still  there,  under  the  smoking  mass 
of  wreckage;  the  smell  of  burned  human  flesh 
was  in  the  air. 

A  few  steps  away  there  was  a  little  house 
standing  intact.  On  the  floor  there  were 
stretched  four  rolls  of  white  cloth.  The  Gen- 
eral and  those  with  him  took  off  their  hats  as 
they  entered.  He  opened  one  of  the  pack- 
ages and  you  saw  only  a  charred  black  mass, 
something  that  looked  like  a  half-burned  log 
taken  from  the  fireplace.  But  two  days  ago 
it  had  been  a  man,  and  the  metal  disk  of 
identification  had  already  been  found  and 
had  served  to  disclose  the  victim's  name. 
These  were  the  first  bodies  that  had  been  re- 
moved from  the  ruins. 

Taking  our  cars  again  we  drove  back  and 
stopped  before  the  Mairie,  and  passing  under 
the  arch  entered  the  courtyard.  The  build- 


54         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

ing  had  fared  better  than  most,  but  there 
were  many  shell  marks.  In  the  courtyard 
were  four  guns.  Forty-six  years  before  an- 
other German  army  had  come  down  from  the 
North,  another  whirlwind  of  artillery  had 
struck  the  town  and  laid  it  in  ashes,  but  even 
under  the  ashes  the  town  had  held  out  for 
three  weeks.  Afterward  the  Republic  of 
France  had  given  these  guns  to  the  people  of 
Verdun  in  recognition  of  their  heroism. 

In  the  courtyard  I  was  presented  to  a  man 
wearing  the  uniform  and  helmet  of  a  fireman. 
He  was  the  chief  of  the  Verdun  fire  depart- 
ment. His  mission,  his  perilous  duty,  it  was 
to  help  extinguish  the  fires  that  flamed  up 
after  every  shell.  In  all  my  life  I  have  never 
seen  a  man  at  once  so  crushed  and  so  patently 
courageous.  He  was  not  young,  but  his  blue 
Lorraine  eyes  were  still  clear.  Yet  he  looked 
at  you,  he  looked  out  upon  the  world  with 
undisguised  amazement.  For  a  generation 
his  business  had  been  to  fight  fires.  He  had 
protected  his  little  town  from  conflagrations 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS         55 

that  might  sometimes,  perhaps  once,  possibly 
twice,  have  risen  to  the  dignity  of  a  "three 
alarm."  For  the  rest  he  had  dealt  with 
blazes. 

Now  out  of  the  skies  and  the  darkness 
and  out  of  the  daylight,  too,  fire  had  de- 
scended upon  his  town.  Under  an  ava- 
lanche of  incendiary  shells,  under  a  landslide 
of  fire,  his  city  was  melting  visibly  into  ashes. 
He  had  lived  fire  and  dreamed  fire  for  half  a 
century,  but  now  the  world  had  turned  to 
fire — his  world — and  he  looked  out  upon  it  in 
dazed  wonder.  He  could  no  longer  fight  this 
fire,  restrain  it,  conquer  it;  he  could  only  go 
out  under  the  bursting  shells  and  strive  to 
minimize  by  some  fraction  the  destruction; 
but  it  wajs  only  child's  play,  this  work  of  his 
which  had  been  a  man's  business.  And 
there  was  no  mistaking  the  fact  that  this 
world  was  now  too  much  for  him.  He  was 
a  brave  man;  they  told  me  of  things  he  had 
done;  but  his  little  cosmos  had  gone  to  chaos 
utterly. 


56         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

We  entered  our  cars  again  and  went  to 
another  quarter  of  the  city.  Everywhere 
where  ashes  and  ruin,  but  everywhere  the 
sense  of  a  destruction  that  was  progressive, 
not  complete:  it  still  marched.  It  was  as 
Arras  had  been,  they  told  me,  before  the  last 
wall  had  tumbled  and  the  Artois  capital 
had  become  nothing  but  a  memory.  We 
climbed  the  slope  toward  the  cathedral  and 
stopped  in  a  little  square  still  unscathed,  the 
Place  d'Armes,  the  most  historic  acre  of  the 
town.  After  a  moment  I  realized  what  my 
friends  were  telling  me.  It  was  in  this  square 
that  the  Crown  Prince  was  to  receive  the  sur- 
render of  the  town.  Along  the  road  we  had 
climbed  he  was  to  lead  his  victorious  army 
through  the  town  and  out  the  Porte  de  France 
beyond.  In  this  square  the  Kaiser  was  to 
stand  and  review  the  army,  to  greet  his  vic- 
torious son.  The  scene  as  it  had  been  ar- 
ranged was  almost  rehearsed  for  you  in  the 
gestures  of  the  French  officers. 

"But  William  has  not  come,"  they  said, 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS         57 

"and  he  will  not  come  now."  This  last  was 
not  spoken  as  a  boast,  but  as  a  faith,  a  con- 
viction. 

Still  climbing  we  came  to  the  cathedral.  It 
is  seated  on  the  very  top  pinnacle  of  the 
rock  of  Verdun,  suggesting  the  French  cities 
of  Provence.  Its  two  towers,  severe  and 
lacking  ornamentation,  are  the  landmarks  of 
the  countryside  for  miles  around.  When  I 
came  back  to  America  I  read  the  story  of  an 
American  correspondent  whom  the  Germans 
had  brought  down  from  Berlin  to  see  the 
destruction  of  Verdun.  They  had  brought 
him  to  the  edge  of  the  hills  and  then  thrown 
some  incendiary  shells  into  the  town,  the 
very  shells  that  killed  the  men  whose  bodies 
I  had  seen.  The  black  smoke  and  flames 
rushed  up  around  these  towers  and  then  the 
Germans  brought  the  correspondent  over  the 
hills  and  showed  him  the  destruction  of 
Verdun.  He  described  it  vividly  and  con- 
cluded that  the  condition  of  the  town  must 
be  desperate. 


58         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

They  are  a  wonderful  people,  these  Ger- 
mans, in  their  stage  manaeement.  Of  course 
this  was  precisely  the  thing  that  they  desired 
that  he  should  feel.  They  had  sent  their 
shells  at  the  right  moment,  the  whole  per- 
formance had  gone  off  like  clockwork.  Those 
poor  blackened  masses  of  humanity  in  the 
house  below  were  the  cost  that  was  repre- 
sented in  the  performance.  And  since  there  is 
much  still  left  to  burn  in  Verdun,  the  Germans 
may  repeat  this  thing  whenever  they  desire. 

But  somewhere  three  or  four  miles  from 
here,  and  between  Verdun  and  the  Germans, 
are  many  thousands  of  Frenchmen,  with  guns 
and  cannon,  and  hearts  of  even  finer  metal. 
They  cannot  even  know  that  Verdun  is  being 
shelled  or  is  burning,  and  if  it  burns  to  ulti- 
mate ashes  it  will  not  affect  them  or  their 
lines.  This  is  the  fallacy  of  all  the  talk  of 
the  destruction  of  Verdun  city  and  the  des- 
perate condition  of  its  defenders.  The  army 
left  Verdun  for  the  hills  when  the  war  began; 
the  people  left  when  the  present  drive  began 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS         59 

in  February.  Even  the  dogs  and  cats,  which 
were  seen  by  correspondents  in  earlier  visits, 
have  been  rescued  and  sent  away.  Verdun 
is  dead,  it  is  almost  as  dead  as  are  Arras  and 
Ypres;  but  neither  of  these  towns  after  a 
year  and  a  half  bombardment  has  fallen. 

The  correspondent  who  was  taken  up  on 
a  hill  by  the  Germans  to  see  Verdun  burn, 
after  it  had  been  carefully  set  on  fire  by 
shell  fire,  was  discovered  by  French  gunners 
and  shelled.  He  went  away  taking  with  him 
an  impression  of  a  doomed  city.  This  pic- 
ture was  duly  transmitted  to  America.  But 
two  days  later,  when  I  visited  the  city,  there 
was  no  evidence  of  desperation,  because  there 
was  no  one  left  to  be  desperate.  Doubtless 
on  occasion  we  shall  have  many  more  de- 
scriptions of  the  destruction  of  this  town, 
descriptions  meant  to  impress  Americans  or 
encourage  Germans.  The  material  for  such 
fires  is  not  exhausted.  The  cathedral  on  the 
top  of  the  hill  is  hardly  shell-marked  at  all, 
and  it  will  make  a  famous  display  when  it 


60         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

is  fired  as  was  Rheims,  as  were  the  churches 
of  Champagne  and  Artois.  But  there  is 
something  novel  in  the  thought  of  a  city 
burned,  not  to  make  a  Roman  or  even  Ger- 
man holiday,  but  burned  to  make  the  world 
believe  that  the  Battle  of  Verdun  had  been  a 
German  victory. 

For  two  hours  we  wandered  about  the  town 
exploring  and  estimating  the  effect  of  heavy 
gunfire,  for  the  Germans  are  too  far  from  the 
city  to  use  anything  but  heavy  guns  effec- 
tively. The  impressions  of  such  a  visit  are  too 
numerous  to  recall.  I  shall  mention  but  one 
more.  Behind  the  cathedral  are  cloisters 
that  the  guide  books  mention;  they  inclose 
a  courtyard  that  was  once  decorated  with 
statues  of  saints.  By  some  accident  or 
miracle — there  are  always  miracles  in  shelled 
towns — one  of  these  images,  perhaps  that  of 
the  Madonna,  has  been  lifted  from  its  pedes- 
tal and  thrown  into  the  branches  of  a  tree, 
which  seems  almost  to  hold  it  with  out- 
stretched arms. 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS         61 

At  length  we  left  the  town,  going  out  by  the 
Porte  de  France,  which  cuts  the  old  Vauban 
ramparts,  now  as  deserted  as  those  of  Paris, 
ramparts  that  had  been  covered  with  trees 
and  were  now  strewn  with  the  debris  of  the 
trees  that  had  fallen  under  the  shell  fire.  In 
all  this  time  not  a  shell  had  fallen  in  Verdun; 
it  was  the  first  completely  tranquil  morning  in 
weeks;  but  there  was  always  the  sense  of  im- 
pending destruction,  there  was  always  the 
sense  of  the  approaching  shell.  There  was 
an  odd  subconscious  curiosity,  and  something 
more  than  curiosity,  about  the  mental  proc- 
esses of  some  men,  not  far  away,  who  were 
beside  guns  pointed  toward  you,  guns  which 
yesterday  or  the  day  before  had  sent  their 
destruction  to  the  very  spot  where  you  stood. 

Yet,  oddly  enough,  in  the  town  there  was 
a  wholly  absurd  sense  of  security,  derived 
from  the  fact  that  there  were  still  buildings 
between  you  and  those  guns.  You  saw  that 
the  buildings  went  to  dust  and  ashes  when- 
ever the  guns  were  fired;  you  saw  that  each 


62         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

explosion  might  turn  a  city  block  into  ashes, 
and  yet  you  were  glad  of  the  buildings  and 
there  was  reassurance  in  their  shadows. 
Now  we  travelled  in  the  open  country;  we  be- 
gan to  climb  across  the  face  of  a  bare  hill,  and 
it  was  the  face  that  fronted  the  Germans. 

Presently  the  General's  car  stuck  in  the  mud 
and  we  halted,  for  a  minute  perhaps;  then  we 
went  on;  we  passed  a  dead  horse  lying  in  the 
road,  then  of  a  sudden  came  that  same  terrible 
grinding,  metallic  crash.  I  have  never  seen 
any  description  of  a  heavy  shell  explosion  that 
fitted  it.  Behind  us  we  could  see  the  black 
smoke  rising  from  the  ground  in  a  suburb 
through  which  we  had  just  come.  I  saw 
three  explosions.  A  moment  later  we  were  at 
the  gate  of  Fort  de  la  Chaume,  and  we  were 
warned  not  to  stop,  but  to  hasten  in,  for  the 
Germans,  whenever  they  see  cars  at  this 
point,  suspect  that  Joffre  has  arrived,  or 
President  Poincare,  and  act  accordingly.  We 
did  not  delay. 

Fort  de  la  Chaume  is  one  of  the  many  forti- 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS         63 

fications  built  since  the  Franco-Prussian  War 
and  intended  to  defend  the  city.  Like  all  the 
rest,  it  ceased  to  have  value  when  the  German 
artillery  had  shown  at  Liege  and  at  Namur 
that  it  was  the  master  of  the  fort.  Then  the 
French  left  their  forts  and  went  out  to 
trenches  beyond  and  took  with  them  the 
heavy  guns  that  the  fort  once  boasted. 
To-day  Fort  de  la  Chaume  is  just  an  empty 
shell,  as  empty  as  the  old  Vauban  citadel  in 
the  valley  below.  And  what  is  true  of  this 
fort  is  true  of  all  the  other  forts  of  that  famous 
fortress  of  Verdun,  which  is  no  longer  a  for- 
tress, but  a  sector  in  the  trench  line  that  runs 
from  the  North  Sea  to  Switzerland. 

From  the  walls  of  the  fort  staff  officers 
showed  me  the  surrounding  country.  I 
looked  down  on  the  city  of  Verdun,  hiding 
under  the  shadow  of  its  cathedral.  I  looked 
across  the  level  Meuse  Valley,  with  its  little 
river;  I  studied  the  wall  of  hills  beyond. 
Somewhere  in  the  tangle  on  the  horizon  was 
Douaumont,  which  the  Germans  held.  Down 


64         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

the  valley  of  the  river  in  the  haze  was  the  town 
of  Bras,  which  was  French;  beyond  it  the 
village  of  Vachereauville,  which  was  German. 
Beyond  the  hills  in  the  centre  of  the  picture, 
but  hidden  by  them,  were  Le  Mart  Homme 
and  Hill  304. 

Verdun  is  like  a  lump  of  sugar  in  a  finger 
bowl,  and  I  was  standing  on  the  rim.  It 
seemed  utterly  impossible  that  any  one  should 
even  think  of  this  town  as  a  fortress  or  count 
its  ashes  as  of  meaning  in  the  conflict. 

Somewhere  in  the  background  a  French 
battery  of  heavy  guns  was  firing,  and  the 
sound  was  clear;  but  it  did  not  suggest  war, 
rather  a  blasting  operation.  The  German 
guns  were  still  again.  There  was  a  faint 
billowing  roll  of  gunfire  across  the  river  to- 
ward Douaumont,  but  very  faint.  As  for 
trenches,  soldiers,  evidences  of  battle,  they 
did  not  exist.  I  thought  of  Ralph  Pulitzer's 
vivid  story  of  riding  to  the  Rheims  front  in  a 
military  aeroplane  and  seeing,  of  war,  just 
nothing. 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS         65 

The  geography  of  the  Verdun  country  un- 
rolled before  us  with  absolute  clarity;  the 
whole  relation  of  hills  and  river  and  railroads 
was  unmistakable.  But  despite  the  faint 
sound  of  musketry,  the  occasional  roar  of  a 
French  gun,  I  might  have  been  in  the  Berk- 
shires  looking  down  on  the  Housatonic.  Six 
miles  to  the  north  around  Le  Mort  Homme 
that  battle  which  has  not  stopped  for  two 
months  was  still  going  on.  Around  Douau- 
mont  the  overture  was  just  starting,  the  over- 
ture to  a  stiff  fight  in  the  afternoon,  but  of  all 
the  circumstances  of  battle  that  one  has  read 
of,  that  one  still  vaguely  expects  to  see,  there 
was  not  a  sign.  If  it  suited  their  fancy  the 
Germans  could  turn  the  hill  on  which  I  stood 
into  a  crater  of  ruin,  as  they  did  with  Fort 
Loncin  at  Liege.  We  were  well  within  range, 
easy  range;  we  lived  because  they  had  no 
object  to  serve  by  such  shooting,  but  we  were 
without  even  a  hint  of  their  whereabouts. 

I  have  already  described  the  military  geog- 
raphy of  Verdun.  I  shall  not  attempt  to  re- 


66         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

peat  it  here,  but  it  is  the  invisibility  of  war- 
fare, whether  examined  from  the  earth  or  the 
air,  which  impresses  the  civilian.  If  you  go 
to  the  trenches  you  creep  through  tunnels  and 
cavities  until  you  are  permitted  to  peer 
through  a  peephole,  and  you  see  yellow  dirt 
some  yards  away.  You  may  hear  bullets 
over  your  head,  you  may  hear  shells  passing, 
but  what  you  see  is  a  hillside  with  some  slash- 
ings. That  is  the  enemy.  If  you  go  to  an 
observation  post  back  of  the  trenches,  then 
you  will  see  a  whole  range  of  country,  but  not 
even  the  trenches  of  your  own  side. 

From  the  Grand  Mont  east  of  Nancy  I 
watched  some  French  batteries  shell  the  Ger- 
man line.  I  didn't  see  the  French  guns,  I 
didn't  see  the  German  trenches,  I  didn't  see 
the  French  line.  I  did  see  some  black  smoke 
rising  a  little  above  the  underbrush,  and  I 
was  told  that  the  shells  were  striking  behind 
the  German  lines  and  that  the  gunners  were 
searching  for  a  German  battery.  But  I 
might  as  well  have  been  observing  a  gang  of 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS         67 

Italians  at  blasting  operations  in  the  Mont- 
clair  Mountains.  And  the  officer  with  me 
said:  "Our  children  are  just  amusing  them- 
selves." 

From  Fort  de  la  Chaume  we  rode  back  to 
the  citadel;  and  there  I  was  the  guest  of  the 
General  and  the  officers  of  the  town  garrison; 
their  guest  because  I  was  an  American  who 
came  to  see  their  town.  I  shall  always  re- 
member that  luncheon  down  in  the  very 
depths  of  this  rock  in  a  dimly  lighted  room. 
I  sat  at  the  General's  right,  and  all  around  me 
were  the  men  whose  day's  work  it  was  to  keep 
the  roads  open,  the  machinery  running  in  the 
shell-cursed  city.  Every  time  they  went  out 
into  daylight  they  knew  that  they  might  not 
return.  For  two  months  the  storm  had 
beaten  about  this  rock,  it  had  written  its 
mark  upon  all  these  faces,  and  yet  it  had 
neither  extinguished  the  light  nor  the  laugh- 
ter; the  sense  of  strength  and  of  calmness  was 
inescapable,  and  never  have  I  known  such 
charming,  such  thoughtful  hosts. 


68         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

When  the  champagne  came  the  old  General 
rose  and  made  me  a  little  speech.  He  spoke 
in  English,  with  absolute  correctness,  but  as 
one  who  spoke  it  with  difficulty.  He  wel- 
comed me  as  an  American  to  Verdun,  he 
thanked  me  for  coming,  he  raised  his  glass  to 
drink  to  my  country  and  the  hope  that  in  the 
right  time  she  would  be  standing  with  France 
— in  the  cause  of  civilization.  Always  in  his 
heart,  in  his  thought,  in  his  speech,  the  French- 
man is  thinking  of  that  cause  of  civiliza- 
tion; always  this  is  what  the  terrible  con- 
flict that  is  eating  up  all  France  means  to  him. 

Afterward  we  went  out  of  this  cavern  into 
daylight,  and  the  officers  came  and  shook 
hands  with  me  and  said  good-bye.  One  does 
not  say  au  revoir  at  the  front;  one  says 
bonne  chance — "good  luck;  it  may  and  it 
may  not — we  hope  not."  We  entered  our 
cars  and  were  about  to  start,  when  suddenly, 
with  a  blinding,  stunning  crash,  a  whole 
salvo  landed  in  the  meadow  just  beyond 
the  road,  we  could  not  see  where,  because 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS         69 

some  houses  hid  the  field.  It  was  the  most 
suddenly  appalling  crash  I  have  ever  heard. 

Instantly  the  General  ordered  our  drivers  to 
halt.  He  explained  that  it  might  be  the  be- 
ginning of  a  bombardment  or  only  a  single 
trial,  a  detail  in  the  intermittent  firing  to  cut 
the  road  that  we  were  to  take.  We  sat  wait- 
ing for  several  moments  and  no  more  shots 
came.  Then  the  General  turned  and  gave  an 
order  to  his  car  to  follow,  bade  our  drivers  go 
fast,  and  climbed  into  my  car  and  sat  down. 
The  wandering  American  correspondent  was 
his  guest.  He  could  not  protect  him  from  the 
shell  fire.  He  could  not  prevent  it.  But  he 
could  share  the  danger.  He  could  share  the 
risk,  and  so  he  rode  with  me  the  mile  until  we 
passed  beyond  the  danger  zone.  There  he 
gave  me  another  bonne  chance  and  left  me, 
went  back  to  his  shell-cursed  town  with  its 
ruins  and  its  agonies. 

I  hope  I  shall  see  General  Dubois  again.  I 
hope  it  will  be  on  the  day  when  he  is  made 
Governor  of  Strassburg. 


70         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

As  we  left  Verdun  the  firing  was  increasing; 
it  was  rolling  up  like  a  rising  gale;  the  infantry 
fire  was  becoming  pronounced;  the  Germans 
were  beginning  an  attack  upon  Le  Mort 
Homme.  Just  before  sunset  we  passed 
through  the  Argonne  Forest  and  came  out 
beyond.  On  a  hill  to  the  north  against  the 
sky  the  monument  of  Valmy  stood  out  in 
clear  relief,  marking  the  hill  where  Kellerman 
had  turned  back  another  Prussian  army. 
Then  we  slipped  down  into  the  Plain  of 
Chalons,  where  other  Frenchmen  had  met  and 
conquered  Attila.  At  dark  we  halted  in 
Montmirail,  where  Napoleon  won  his  last 
victory  before  his  empire  fell.  The  sound  of 
the  guns  we  had  left  behind  was  still  in  our 
ears  and  the  meaning  of  these  names  in  our 
minds.  Presently  my  French  companion 
said  to  me:  "It  is  a  long  time,  isn't  it?"  He 
meant  all  the  years  since  the  first  storm  came 
out  of  the  north,  and  I  think  the  same  thought 
is  in  every  Frenchman's  mind.  Then  he  told 
me  his  story. 


71 

"I  had  two  boys,"  he  said;  "one  was  taken 
from  me  years  ago  in  an  accident;  he  was 
killed  and  it  was  terrible.  But  the  other  I 
gave. 

"He  was  shot,  my  last  boy,  up  near  Verdun, 
in  the  beginning  of  the  war.  He  did  not  die 
at  once  and  I  went  to  him.  For  twenty  days 
I  sat  beside  him  in  a  cellar  waiting  for  him  to 
die.  I  bought  the  last  coffin  in  the  village, 
that  he  might  be  buried  in  it,  and  kept  it 
under  my  bed.  We  talked  many  times  be- 
fore he  died,  and  he  told  me  all  he  knew  of  the 
fight,  of  the  men  about  him  and  how  they  fell. 

"My  name  is  finished,  but  I  say  to  you 
now  that  in  all  that  experience  there  was 
nothing  that  was  not  beautiful."  And  as  far 
as  I  can  analyze  or  put  in  words  the  impres- 
sion that  I  have  brought  away  from  France, 
from  the  ruin  and  the  suffering  and  the  de- 
struction, I  think  it  is  expressed  in  those 
words.  I  have  seen  nothing  that  was  not 
beautiful,  too,  because  through  all  the  spirit 
of  France  shone  clear  and  bright. 


Ill 

BATTLE   OF  VERDUN  ANOTHER 
GETTYSBURG 

FAILURE    OF    CROWN    PRINCE    LIKENED    BY 
FRENCH  TO  "HIGH  TIDE"  OF  CONFEDERACY 

THE  parallel  between  Gettysburg  in 
your  Civil  War  and  Verdun  in  the 
present  contest  is  unmistakable  and 
striking."      This   was  said  to  me  by  Gen- 
eral Delacroix,  one  of  Joffre's  predecessors 
as  chief  of  the  French  General  Staff  and  the 
distinguished  military  critic  of  the  Paris  Temps 
now  that  because  of  age  he  has  passed  to  the 
retired  list. 

What  General  Delacroix  meant  was  patent 
and  must  have  already  impressed  many 
Americans.  Our  own  Gettysburg  was  the 
final  bid  for  decision  of  a  South  which  had 
long  been  victorious  on  the  battlefield,  which 

72 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS         73 

still  possessed  the  armies  that  seemed  the 
better  organized  and  the  generals  whose  cam- 
paigns had  been  wonderfully  successful.  But 
it  was  the  bid  for  decision  of  a  Confederacy 
which  was  outnumbered  in  men,  in  resources, 
in  the  ultimate  powers  of  endurance,  and  was 
already  beginning  to  feel  the  growing  pinch 
both  in  numbers  and  credit. 

At  Gettysburg  Lee  made  his  final  effort  to 
destroy  the  army  which  he  had  frequently  de- 
feated but  never  eliminated.  Victory  meant 
the  fall  of  Washington,  the  coming  of  despair 
to  the  North,  an  end  of  the  Civil  War,  which 
would  bring  independence  and  the  prize  for 
which  they  had  contended  to  the  Confeder- 
ates. And  Lee  failed  at  Gettysburg,  not  as 
Napoleon  failed  at  Waterloo  or  as  MacMahon 
failed  at  Sedan,  but  he  failed,  and  his  failure 
was  the  beginning  of  the  end.  The  victory  of 
Gettysburg  put  new  heart,  new  assurance 
into  the  North ;  it  broke  the  long  illusion  of  an 
invincible  Confederacy;  it  gave  to  Europe,  to 
London,  and  to  Paris,  even  more  promptly 


74         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

than  to  Washington,  the  unmistakable  mes- 
sage that  the  North  was  bound  to  win  the 
Civil  War. 

I  mean  in  a  moment  to  discuss  the  military 
aspects  of  this  conflict  about  the  Lorraine 
fortress,  but  before  the  military  it  is  essential 
to  grasp  the  moral  consequences  of  Verdun 
to  France,  to  the  Allies,  to  Germany.  Not 
since  the  Marne,  not  even  then — because  it 
was  only  after  a  long  delay  that  France  really 
knew  what  had  happened  in  this  struggle — 
has  anything  occurred  that  has  so  profoundly, 
so  indescribably,  heartened  the  French  people 
as  has  the  victory  at  Verdun.  It  is  not  too 
much  to  say  that  the  victory  has  been  the 
most  immediately  inspiring  thing  in  French 
national  life  since  the  disaster  at  Sedan  and 
that  it  has  roused  national  confidence,  hope, 
faith,  as  nothing  else  has  since  the  present 
conflict  began. 

In  this  sense  rather  than  in  the  military 
sense  Verdun  was  a  decisive  battle  and  its  con- 
sequences of  far-reaching  character.  France 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS         75 

as  a  whole,  from  the  moment  when  the  attack 
began,  understood  the  issue;  the  battle  was 
fought  in  the  open  and  the  whole  nation 
watched  the  communiques  day  by  day.  It 
was  accepted  as  a  terrible  if  not  a  final  test, 
and  no  Frenchman  fails  to  recognize  in  all 
that  he  says  the  strength,  the  power,  the  mili- 
tary skill  of  Germany. 

And  when  the  advance  was  checked,  when 
after  the  first  two  weeks  the  battle  flickered 
out  as  did  the  French  offensive  in  Cham- 
pagne and  the  former  German  drive  about 
Ypres  a  year  ago,  France,  which  had  held  her 
breath  and  waited,  hoped,  read  in  the  results 
at  Verdun  the  promise  of  ultimate  victory, 
felt  that  all  that  Germany  had,  all  that  she 
could  produce,  had  been  put  to  the  test  and 
had  failed  to  accomplish  the  result  for  which 
Germany  had  striven — or  any  portion  thereof. 

War  is  something  beyond  armies  and 
tactics,  beyond  strategy  and  even  military 
genius,  and  the  real  meaning  of  Verdun  is  not 
to  be  found  in  lines  held  or  lost,  not  to  be  found 


76         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

even  in  the  ashes  of  the  old  town  that  France 
and  not  Germany  holds.  It  is  to  be  found  in 
the  spirit  of  France,  now  that  the  great  trial  is 
over  and  the  lines  have  held. 

It  was  Germany  and  not  France  that 
raised  the  issue  of  Verdun.  The  Germans 
believed,  and  all  their  published  statements 
show  this,  that  France  was  weary,  disheart- 
ened, ready  to  quit,  on  fair  terms.  They  be- 
lieved that  there  was  needed  only  a  shining 
victory,  a  great  moral  demonstration  of 
German  strength  to  accomplish  the  end — to 
bring  victorious  peace.  In  this  I  think,  and 
all  with  whom  I  talked  in  France  felt,  that  the 
Germans  were  wrong,  that  France  would  have 
endured  defeat  and  gone  on.  But  conversely, 
the  Germans  knew,  must  have  known,  that  to 
try  and  to  fail  was  to  rouse  the  whole  heart  of 
France,  to  destroy  any  pessimism,  and  this  is 
precisely  what  the  failure  has  done. 

The  battle  for  Verdun  was  a  battle  for 
moral  rather  than  military  values,  and  the 
moral  victory  remains  with  the  French.  It 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS         77 

was  a  deliberate  and  calculated  effort  to 
break  the  spirit  of  France,  and  it  roused  the 
spirit  of  France  as  perhaps  nothing  has  raised 
the  spirit  of  this  people  since  Valmy,  where 
other  Frenchmen  met  and  checked  another 
German  invasion,  brought  to  a  halt  the  army 
of  Frederick  the  Great,  which  still  preserved 
the  prestige  of  its  great  captain  who  was  dead, 
turned  it  back  along  the  road  that  was  pres- 
ently to  end  at  Jena. 

Beside  the  moral  value  of  Verdun  the  mili- 
tary is  just  nothing.  To  appreciate  its  mean- 
ing you  must  understand  what  it  has  meant 
to  the  French,  and  you  must  understand  it 
by  recalling  what  Gettysburg  meant  to  the 
North,  invaded  as  is  France,  defeated  at  half 
a  dozen  struggles  in  Virginia  as  France  has 
been  defeated  in  the  past  months  of  this  war. 
Gettysburg  was  and  remains  the  decisive 
battle  of  our  Civil  War,  although  the  con- 
flict lasted  for  nearly  two  years  more.  For 
France  Verdun  is  exactly  the  same  thing. 
Having  accepted  the  moral  likeness,  you  may 


78         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

find  much  that  is  instructive  and  suggestive  in 
the  military,  but  this  is  of  relatively  minor 
importance. 

Now,  on  the  military  side  it  is  necessary  to 
know  first  of  all  that  when  the  Germans  be- 
gan their  gigantic  attack  upon  Verdun  the 
French  high  command  decided  not  to  defend 
the  city.  Joffre  and  those  who  with  him  di- 
rect the  French  armies  were  agreed  that  the 
city  of  Verdun  was  without  military  value 
comparable  with  the  cost  of  defending  it,  and 
that  the  wisest  and  best  thing  to  do  was  to 
draw  back  the  lines  to  the  hills  above  the  city 
and  west  of  the  Meuse.  Had  their  will  pre- 
vailed there  would  have  been  no  real  battle  at 
Verdun  and  the  Germans  would  long  ago  have 
occupied  the  ashes  of  the  town. 

Joffre's  view  was  easily  explicable,  and  it 
was  hardly  possible  to  quarrel  with  the  mili- 
tary judgment  it  discloses.  To  the  world 
Verdun  is  a  great  fortress,  a  second  Gibraltar, 
encircled  by  great  forts,  furnished  with  huge 
guns,  the  gateway  to  Paris  and  the  key  to  the 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS         79 

French  eastern  frontier.  And  this  is  just 
what  Verdun  was  until  the  coming  of  the 
present  war,  when  the  German  and  Austrian 
siege  guns  levelled  the  forts  of  Antwerp,  of 
Maubeuge,  of  Liege.  But  after  that  Verdun 
ceased  to  be  anything,  because  all  fortresses 
lost  their  value  with  the  revelation  that  they 
had  failed  to  keep  pace  with  the  gun. 

After  the  Battle  of  the  Marne,  when  the 
trench  war  began,  the  French  took  all  their 
guns  out  of  the  forts  of  Verdun,  pushed  out 
before  the  forts,  and  Verdun  became  just  a 
sector  in  the  long  trench  line  from  the  sea  to 
Switzerland.  It  was  defended  by  trenches, 
not  forts.  It  was  neither  of  more  importance 
nor  less  than  any  other  point  in  the  line  and  it 
was  a  place  of  trenches,  not  of  forts.  The 
forts  were  empty  and  remain  empty,  monu- 
ments to  the  past  of  war,  quite  as  useless  as 
the  walls  of  Rome  would  be  against  modern 
artillery. 

The  decline  of  Verdun  was  even  more  com- 
plete. From  the  strongest  point  in  French 


80         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

defence  it  became  the  weakest.  When  the 
Germans  took  St.  Mihiel  in  September,  1914, 
they  cut  the  north  and  south  railroad  that 
binds  Verdun  to  the  Paris-Nancy  Railroad. 
When  they  retreated  from  the  Marne  they 
halted  at  Varennes  and  Montfaucon,  and 
from  these  points  they  command  the  Paris- 
Verdun-Metz  Railroad.  Apart  from  a  single 
narrow-gauge  railroad  of  minor  value,  which 
wanders  among  the  hills,  climbing  at  pro- 
hibitive grades,  Verdun  is  isolated  from  the 
rest  of  France.  Consider  what  this  means  in 
modern  war  when  the  amount  of  ammunition 
consumed  in  a  day  almost  staggers  belief. 
Consider  what  it  means  when  there  are  a 
quarter  of  a  million  men  to  be  fed  and  mu- 
nitioned in  this  sector. 

More  than  all  this,  when  the  lines  came 
down  to  the  trench  condition  Verdun  was  a 
salient,  it  was  a  narrow  curve  bulging  out  into 
the  German  front.  It  was  precisely  the  same 
sort  of  military  position  as  Ypres,  which  the 
Germans  have  twice  before  selected  as  the 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS         81 

point  for  a  great  attack.  In  the  Verdun 
sector  the  French  are  exposed  to  a  converging 
fire;  they  are  inside  the  German  semicircle. 
Moreover,  the  salient  is  so  narrow  that  the 
effect  of  converging  fire  is  not  to  be  exagger- 
ated. 

When  the  French  attacked  the  Germans  in 
Champagne  last  fall  they  advanced  on  a  wide 
front  from  a  line  parallel  to  the  German  line. 
As  they  pierced  the  first  German  lines  they 
were  exposed  to  the  converging  fire  of  the 
Germans,  because  they  were  pushing  a  wedge 
in.  Ultimately  they  got  one  brigade  through 
all  the  German  lines,  but  it  was  destroyed  be- 
yond by  this  converging  fire.  But  as  the 
Germans  advanced  upon  Verdun  they  were 
breaking  down  a  salient  and  possessed  the 
advantage  they  had  had  on  the  defensive  in 
Champagne. 

Finally,  one-half  the  French  army  of  Ver- 
dun fought  with  its  back  to  a  deep  river,  con- 
nected with  the  other  half  only  by  bridges, 
some  of  which  presently  came  under  German 


82         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

fire,  and  there  was  every  possibility  that  these 
troops  might  be  cut  off  and  captured  if  the 
German  advance  were  pushed  home  far 
enough  on  the  west  bank  of  the  Meuse  and 
the  German  artillery  was  successful  in  inter- 
rupting the  passage  of  the  river.  It  was  a 
perilous  position  and  there  were  some  days 
when  the  situation  seemed  critical. 

Accordingly,  when  the  German  drive  at 
Verdun  was  at  last  disclosed  in  its  real  magni- 
tude Joffre  prepared  to  evacuate  the  town  and 
the  east  bank  of  the  river,  to  straighten  his 
line  and  abolish  the  salient  and  give  over  to 
the  Germans  the  wreck  of  Verdun.  The 
position  behind  the  river  was  next  to  im- 
pregnable; the  lines  would  then  be  parallel; 
there  would  be  no  salient,  and  in  the  new 
position  the  French  could  concentrate  their 
heavy  artillery  while  the  Germans  were  mov- 
ing up  the  guns  that  they  had  fixed  to  the 
north  of  the  old  front. 

But  at  this  point  the  French  politician  in- 
terfered. He  recognized  the  wisdom  of  the 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS         83 

merely  military  view  of  Joffre,  but  he  saw  also 
the  moral  value.  He  recognized  that  the 
French  and  the  German  public  alike  would 
not  see  Verdun  as  a  mere  point  in  a  trench 
line  and  a  point  almost  impossible  to  defend 
and  destitute  of  military  value.  He  saw  that 
the  French  and  German  publics  would  think 
of  Verdun  as  it  had  been  thought  of  before  the 
present  war  changed  all  the  conditions  of  con- 
flict. He  recognized  that  the  German  people 
would  be  roused  to  new  hope  and  confidence 
by  the  capture  of  a  great  fortress,  and  that  the 
French  would  be  equally  depressed  by  losing 
what  they  believed  was  a  great  fortress. 

You  had  therefore  in  France  for  some  hours, 
perhaps  for  several  days,  something  that 
approximated  a  crisis  growing  out  of  the 
division  of  opinion  between  the  civil  and  the 
military  authorities,  a  division  of  opinion 
based  upon  two  wholly  different  but  not  im- 
possible equally  correct  appraisals.  Joffre 
did  not  believe  it  was  worth  the  men  or  the 
risk  to  hold  a  few  square  miles  of  French 


84 

territory,  since  to  evacuate  would  strengthen, 
not  weaken,  the  line.  The  French  politicians 
recognized  that  to  lose  Verdun  was  to  suffer  a 
moral  defeat  which  would  almost  infallibly 
bring  down  the  Ministry,  might  call  into  ex- 
istence a  new  Committee  of  Public  Safety,  and 
would  fire  the  German  heart  and  depress  the 
French. 

In  the  end  the  politicians  had  their  way  and 
Castelnau,  Joffre's  second  in  command,  came 
over  to  their  view  and  set  out  for  Verdun  to 
organize  the  defence  for  the  position  at  the 
eleventh  hour.  He  had  with  him  Petain,  the 
man  who  had  commanded  the  French  army 
in  the  Battle  of  Champagne  and  henceforth 
commanded  the  army  that  was  hurried  to  the 
Verdun  sector.  France  now  took  up  definitely 
the  gage  of  battle  as  Germany  had  laid  it 
down.  Verdun  now  became  a  battle  in  the 
decisive  sense  of  the  word,  although  still  on 
the  moral  side.  Nothing  is  more  prepos- 
terous than  to  believe  that  there  ever  was  any 
chance  of  a  German  advance  through  Verdun 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS          85 

to  Paris.  One  has  only  to  go  to  Verdun  and 
see  the  country  and  the  lines  behind  the  city 
and  miles  back  of  the  present  front  to  realize 
how  foolish  such  talk  is. 

Meantime  the  German  advance  had  been 
steady  and  considerable.  All  these  attacks 
follow  the  same  course — Ypres,  Artois,  Cham- 
pagne, Dunajec.  There  is  first  the  tremendous 
artillery  concentration  of  the  assailant;  then 
the  bombardment  which  abolishes  the  first 
and  second  line  trenches  of  the  defenders; 
then  the  infantry  attack  which  takes  these 
ruined  trenches  and  almost  invariably  many 
thousands  of  prisoners  and  scores  of  guns. 
But  now  the  situation  changes.  The  assail- 
ant has  passed  beyond  the  effective  range  of 
his  own  heavy  artillery,  which  cannot  be  im- 
mediately advanced  because  of  its  weight;  he 
encounters  a  line  of  trenches  that  has  not  been 
levelled,  he  has  come  under  the  concentrated 
fire  of  his  foe's  heavy  and  light  artillery  with- 
out the  support  of  his  own  heavy  artillery, 
and  all  the  advantage  of  surprise  has  gone. 


86         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

What  happened  at  Verdun  is  what  hap- 
pened in  the  Champagne.  The  German  ad- 
vance was  quite  as  successful — rather  more 
successful  than  the  French  last  September;  it 
covered  three  or  four  miles  on  a  considerable 
front,  and  it  even  reached  Douaumont,  one  of 
the  old  forts  and  the  fort  which  was  placed 
on  the  highest  hill  in  the  environs  of  Verdun. 
Thousands  of  prisoners  had  been  captured  and 
many  guns  taken.  But  at  this  point  the 
French  resistance  stiffened,  as  had  the  Ger- 
man last  year.  French  reserves  and  artil- 
lery arrived.  Petain  and  Castelnau  arrived. 
There  was  an  end  of  the  rapid  advance  and 
there  began  the  pounding,  grinding  attack  in 
which  the  advantage  passed  to  the  defender. 
It  was  just  what  happened  at  Neuve  Chapelle 
so  long  ago  when  we  first  saw  this  kind  of 
fighting  exemplified  completely. 

In  the  new  attacks  the  Germans  still  gained 
ground,  but  they  gained  ground  because  the 
French  withdrew  from  positions  made  un- 
tenable through  the  original  German  advance 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS         87 

at  other  points.  They  consolidated  their  line, 
organized  their  new  front.  Ten  days  after 
the  attack  had  begun  it  had  ceased  to  be  a 
question  of  Verdun,  just  as  in  a  shorter  time 
the  French  had  realized  last  September  that 
they  could  not  break  the  German  line  in 
Champagne.  But  like  the  French  in  Cham- 
pagne, like  the  British  at  Neuve  Chapelle,  the 
Germans  persevered,  and  in  consequence 
suffered  colossal  losses,  exactly  as  the  French 
and  British  had. 

To  understand  the  German  tactics  you 
must  recognize  two  things.  The  Germans 
had  expected  to  take  Verdun,  and  they  had 
unquestionably  known  that  the  French  mili- 
tary command  did  not  intend  at  the  outset  to 
hold  the  town.  They  had  advertised  the  com- 
ing victory  far  and  wide  over  the  world;  they 
had  staked  much  upon  it.  Moreover,  in  the 
first  days,  when  they  had  taken  much  ground, 
when  they  had  got  Douaumont  and  could 
look  down  into  Verdun,  they  had  every 
reason  to  believe  that  they  possessed  the  key 


88         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

to  the  city  and  that  the  French  high  command 
was  slowly  but  steadily  drawing  back  its  lines 
and  would  presently  evacuate  the  city. 

Knowing  these  things  you  can  understand 
why  the  Germans  were  so  confident.  They 
did  not  invent  stories  of  coming  victory  which 
they  did  not  believe.  They  believed  that 
Verdun  was  to  fall  because  they  knew,  and 
the  same  thing  was  known  and  mentioned  in 
London.  I  heard  it  there  when  the  battle 
was  in  its  earlier  stages — that  the  French  high 
command  intended  to  evacuate  Verdun. 
What  they  did  not  know  and  could  not  know 
was  that  the  French  politicians,  perhaps  one 
should  say  statesmen  this  time,  had  inter- 
fered, that  the  French  high  command  had 
yielded  and  that  Verdun  was  to  be  defended 
to  the  last  ditch. 

When  this  decision  was  made  the  end  of  the 
real  German  advance  was  almost  instan- 
taneous. All  that  has  happened  since  has 
been  nothing  but  active  trench  war,  violent 
fighting,  desperate  charge  and  counter  charge, 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS         89 

a  material  shortening  of  the  French  line  at 
certain  points,  the  abolition  of  minor  salients, 
but  of  actual  progress  not  the  smallest.  The 
advance  stopped  before  lines  on  which  Petain 
elected  to  make  his  stand  when  he  came  with 
his  army  to  defend  Verdun.  The  Germans 
are  still  several  miles  outside  of  Verdun  itself, 
and  only  at  Douaumont  have  they  touched 
the  line  of  the  exterior  forts,  which  before  the 
war  were  expected  to  defend  the  city. 

In  Paris  and  elsewhere  you  will  be  told  that 
Douaumont  was  occupied  without  resistance 
and  that  it  was  abandoned  under  orders  be- 
fore there  had  been  a  decision  to  hold  Verdun. 
I  do  not  pretend  to  know  whether  this  is  true 
or  not,  although  I  heard  it  on  authority  that 
was  wholly  credible,  but  the  fact  that  the  map 
discloses,  that  I  saw  for  myself  at  Verdun,  is 
that,  save  for  Douaumont,  none  of  the  old 
forts  have  been  taken  and  that  the  Germans 
have  never  been  able  to  advance  a  foot  from 
Douaumont  or  reach  the  other  forts  at  any 
other  point.  And  this  is  nothing  more  or 


90         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

less  than  the  French  experience  at  Champagne, 
the  German  experience  about  Ypres  in  1915. 

In  a  later  chapter  I  hope  to  discuss  the  sit- 
uation at  Verdun  as  I  saw  it  on  April  6th,  and 
also  the  miracle  of  motor  transport  which 
played  so  great  a  part  in  the  successful  de- 
fence of  the  position.  But  the  military  de- 
tails are  wholly  subordinate  to  the  moral.  All 
France  was  roused  by  a  successful  defence  of  a 
position  attacked  by  Germany  with  the  adver- 
tised purpose  of  breaking  the  spirit  of  the 
French  people.  The  battle  was  fought  in  the 
plain  daylight  without  the  smallest  conceal- 
ment, and  the  least-informed  reader  of  the 
official  reports  could  grasp  the  issue  which  was 
the  fate  of  the  city  of  Verdun. 

The  fact,  known  to  a  certain  number  of 
Frenchmen  only,  that  the  defence  was  im- 
provised after  the  decision  had  been  made  to 
evacuate  the  whole  salient,  serves  for  them  to 
increase  the  meaning  of  the  victory  as  it  in- 
creases the  real  extent  of  the  French  exploit. 
But  this  is  a  detail.  The  Germans  openly, 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS         91 

deliberately,  after  long  preparation,  an- 
nounced their  purpose,  used  every  conceiv- 
able bit  of  strength  they  could  bring  to  bear  to 
take  Verdun,  and  told  their  own  people  not 
merely  that  Verdun  would  fall,  but  at  one 
moment  that  it  had  fallen.  They  did  this 
with  the  firm  conviction  that  it  would  fall — 
was  falling. 

The  French  were  steadily  aware  that  Ver- 
dun might  be  lost.  They  knew  from  letters 
coming  daily  from  the  front  how  terrible  the 
struggle  was,  and  it  is  impossible  to  exagger- 
ate the  tension  of  the  early  days,  although  it 
was  not  a  tension  of  panic  or  fear.  Paris  did 
not  expect  to  see  the  invader,  and  there  was 
nothing  of  this  sort  of  moonshine  abroad. 
But  it  was  plain  that  the  fall  of  the  town 
would  bring  a  tremendous  wave  of  depression 
and  if  not  despair  yet  a  real  reduction  of  hope. 
Instead,  Verdun  defended  itself,  the  lines 
were  maintained  several  miles  on  the  other 
side  of  the  town  and  all  substantial  advance 
came  to  an  end  in  the  first  two  weeks.  The 


92         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

army  itself,  the  military  observers,  were  con- 
vinced that  all  danger  was  over  as  early  as  the 
second  week  in  March,  when  correspondents 
of  French  newspapers  were  being  taken  to 
Verdun  to  see  the  situation  and  tell  the  people 
the  facts. 

All  over  Northern  France,  and  I  was  in 
many  towns  and  cities,  the  "lift"  that  Ver- 
dun had  brought  was  unmistakable  and 
French  confidence  was  everywhere  evident. 
It  showed  itself  in  a  spontaneous  welcome  to 
Alexander  of  Serbia  in  Paris,  which,  I  am  told, 
was  the  first  thing  of  the  sort  in  the  war 
period.  Frenchmen  did  not  say  that  Verdun 
was  the  beginning  of  the  end,  and  they  did  not 
forecast  the  prompt  collapse  of  Germany. 
They  did  not  even  forecast  the  immediate  end 
of  the  fighting  about  Verdun.  They  did  not 
regard  the  victory  as  a  Waterloo  or  a  Sedan 
or  any  other  foolish  thing.  But  they  did 
rather  coolly  and  quite  calmly  appraise  the 
thing  and  see  in  it  the  biggest  German  failure 
since  the  Marne,  and  a  failure  in  a  fight  which 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS         93 

the  Germans  had  laid  down  all  the  conditions 
in  advance  and  advertised  the  victory  that 
they  did  not  achieve  as  promising  the  collapse 
of  French  endurance  and  spirit. 

The  Battle  of  Verdun  was  a  battle  for 
moral  values,  and  the  possession  of  the  town 
itself  was  never  of  any  real  military  value. 
Verdun  commands  nothing,  and  behind  it  lie 
well-prepared  fortifications  on  dominating 
heights,  positions  that  are  ten  times  as  easy  to 
defend  as  those  which  the  French  have  de- 
fended. It  was  not  a  battle  for  Paris,  and 
there  was  never  a  prospect  of  the  piercing  of 
the  French  line;  Germany  was  never  as  near  a 
great  military  success  as  she  was  at  Ypres 
after  the  first  gas  attack  a  year  ago.  The 
French  army  leaders  judged  the  Verdun 
position  as  not  worth  the  cost  of  defending. 
They  were  overruled  by  the  politicians  and 
they  defended  it  successfully.  But  their  first 
decision  is  the  best  evidence  of  the  wholly 
illusory  value  that  has  been  attached  to  the 
possession  of  Verdun  itself. 


94         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

The  politicians  were  unquestionably  right 
as  to  the  moral  value,  and  it  is  possible  if  not 
probable  that  the  relinquishment  of  the  city 
voluntarily  might  have  precipitated  the  fall  of 
the  Briand  Ministry  and  the  creation  of  a 
Committee  of  Public  Safety — not  to  make 
peace,  but  to  make  war  successfully.  The 
will  to  defend  Verdun  came  from  the  French 
people,  it  imposed  itself  upon  the  army  and  it 
resulted  in  a  moral  victory  the  consequences 
of  which  cannot  be  exaggerated  and  have 
given  new  heart  and  confidence  to  a  people 
whose  courage  and  determination  must  make 
an  enduring  impression  on  any  one  who  sees 
France  in  the  present  terrible  but  glorious 
time. 


IV 

VERDUN,   THE   DOOR   THAT   LEADS 
NOWHERE 

THE   BATTLE   AND    THE    TOPOGRAPHY    OF   THE 

BATTLEFIELD AN   ANALYSIS   OF   THE 

ATTACK   AND    DEFENCE 

IN  A  preceding  article  I  have  endeavored 
to  explain  the  tremendous  moral  "lift" 
that  the  successful  defence  of  the  city  of 
Verdun  has  brought  to  France,  a  moral 
"lift"  which  has  roused  French  confidence 
and  expectation  of  ultimate  victory  to  the 
highest  point  since  the  war  began.  I  have 
also  tried  to  demonstrate  how  utterly  without 
value  the  fortress  of  Verdun  was,  because 
the  forts  were  of  no  use  in  the  present  war, 
were  as  useless  against  German  heavy  artil- 
lery as  those  of  Antwerp  and  Maubeuge,  and 
had  been  evacuated  by  the  French  a  full 

95 


96         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

eighteen  months  before  the  present  battle 
began.  Finally  I  have  indicated  that  so 
little  military  value  was  attached  to  Verdun 
by  the  French  high  command  that  it  was 
prepared  to  evacuate  the  whole  position, 
which  is  the  most  difficult  to  defend  on  the 
whole  French  front,  and  was  only  persuaded 
to  give  over  his  purpose  by  the  arguments 
of  the  politicians,  who  believed  that  the  moral 
effect  of  the  evacuation  would  be  disastrous 
to  France  and  inspiriting  to  Germany. 

I  now  desire  to  describe  at  some  length  the 
actual  topographical  circumstances  of  Ver- 
dun and  later  I  shall  discuss  the  fashion  in 
which  an  automobile  transport  system  was 
improvised  to  meet  the  situation  created 
by  the  interruption  of  traffic  by  German 
artillery  fire  along  the  two  considerable  rail- 
road lines.  It  was  this  system  which  actually 
saved  the  town  and  is  the  real  "miracle  of 
Verdun,"  if  one  is  to  have  miracles  to  explain 
what  brave  and  skilful  men  do. 

I  saw  Verdun  on  April  6th.    I  went  through 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS          97 

the  city,  which  was  little  more  than  a  mass  of 
ashes,  with  General  Dubois,  the  military 
governor  of  the  town  itself,  and  with  him  I 
went  to  Fort  de  la  Chaume,  on  one  of  the 
highest  hills  near  Verdun,  and  from  this  van- 
tage point  had  the  whole  countryside  ex- 
plained to  me.  The  day  on  which  I  visited 
Verdun  was  the  first  completely  quiet  day  in 
weeks,  and  I  was  thus  fortunate  in  being  able 
to  see  and  to  go  about  without  the  disturbing 
or  hindering  circumstances  which  are  incident 
to  a  bombardment. 

The  city  of  Verdun  is  situated  at  the  bot- 
tom of  the  Meuse  Valley  on  both  sides  of  the 
river.  But  the  main  portion  of  the  town  is 
on  the  west  bank  and  surrounds  a  low  hill, 
crowned  by  the  cathedral  and  old  Vauban 
citadel.  The  town  is  surrounded  by  old 
ramparts,  long  ago  deprived  of  military  value 
and  belonging,  like  the  citadel,  to  eighteenth 
century  warfare.  The  Valley  of  the  Meuse 
is  here  several  miles  wide,  as  flat  as  your  hand, 
and  the  river,  which  is  small  but  fairly  deep, 


98         THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

a  real  obstacle  since  it  cannot  be  forded, 
wanders  back  and  forth  from  one  side  of  the 
valley  to  the  other.  Below  Verdun  it  is 
doubled,  as  a  military  obstacle,  by  the  Canal 
de  1'Est. 

If  you  put  a  lump  of  sugar  in  a  finger  bowl 
you  will  pretty  fairly  reproduce  the  Verdun 
topography.  The  lump  of  sugar  will  repre- 
sent Verdun,  the  rim  of  the  bowl  the  hills 
around  the  city,  the  interior  of  the  bowl  the 
little  basin  in  which  the  city  stands.  This 
rim  of  hills,  which  rise  some  five  or  six  hun- 
dred feet  above  the  town  itself,  is  broken  on 
the  west  by  a  deep  and  fairly  narrow  trough 
which  comes  into  the  Meuse  Valley  and  con- 
nects it  some  thirty  miles  to  the  west  with  the 
Plain  of  Chalons.  If  you  should  look  down 
upon  this  region  from  an  aeroplane  this  fur- 
row would  look  like  a  very  deep  gutter  cut- 
ting far  into  the  tangle  of  hills. 

Now  in  the  warfare  of  other  centuries 
the  value  of  the  Verdun  fortress  was  just  this: 
the  furrow  which  I  have  described  is  the 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS          99 

one  avenue  available  for  an  invading  army 
coming  from  the  east  out  of  Metz  or  south 
from  Luxemburg  and  aiming  to  get  into  the 
Plain  of  Chalons  to  the  west.  It  is  the  way 
the  Prussians  came  in  1792  and  were  de- 
feated at  Valmy,  at  the  western  entrance  of 
the  trough  about  thirty  miles  away.  They 
took  Verdun  on  their  way — so  did  the  Ger- 
mans in  1870. 

Verdun  in  French  hands  closed  this  trough 
to  the  invaders. 

It  closed  it  because  the  low  hill  which  bears 
the  town  was  strongly  fortified  and  was  sur- 
rounded by  lower  ground.  Such  artillery 
as  was  in  existence  was  not  of  a  sufficiently 
long  range  to  place  upon  the  hills  about  Ver- 
dun which  we  have  described  as  the  rim  of 
the  bowl.  The  town  of  Verdun  was  situated 
on  both  sides  of  the  river  and  commanded  all 
the  bridges.  It  was,  in  fact,  the  stopple  in 
the  mouth  of  the  bottle-neck  passage  leading 
into  North  Central  France,  the  passage 
through  which  ran  the  main  road  and,  later, 


100       THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

the  railway  from  the  frontier  nearest  Paris 
to  the  capital. 

But  when  the  modern  developments  of 
artillery  came,  then  Verdun,  the  old  fortress 
that  Vauban  built  for  Louis  XIV,  lost  its 
value.  It  was  commanded  by  the  surround- 
ing hills  and  the  French  moved  out  of  the 
town  and  the  Vauban  fortifications  and  built 
on  the  surrounding  hills,  on  the  rim,  to  go 
back  to  our  figure,  the  forts  which  were  the 
defence  of  the  town  when  the  present  war 
began,  forts  arranged  quite  like  those  of 
Liege  or  Antwerp  and  some  four  or  five  miles 
away  from  the  town.  But  bear  in  mind 
these  forts  were  designed,  like  the  old  fortress 
and  fortifications  of  the  eighteenth  century, 
to  bar  the  road  from  the  Meuse  and  from 
Germany  to  the  Plain  of  Chalons  and  the 
level  country  west  of  the  Argonne.  When 
the  Germans  came  south  through  Belgium 
and  got  into  the  Plain  of  Chalons  from  the 
north  they  had  turned  the  whole  Verdun 
position  and  had  got  into  the  region  it  barred 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS        101 

by  another  route;  they  had  come  in  by  the 
back  door;  Verdun  was  the  front.  Not  only 
that,  but  they  are  there  now  and  have  been 
there  ever  since  the  first  days  of  September, 
1914. 

When  one  hears  about  Verdun  as  the  gate- 
way to  Paris  or  anything  else  one  hears 
about  the  Verdun  of  the  past.  It  was  not  the 
door  to  Paris  but  the  outer  door  to  the  region 
around  Paris,  to  the  Plains  of  Champagne 
and  Chfilons.  But  as  the  Germans  are  al- 
ready in  these  plains  the  taking  of  Verdun 
now  would  not  bring  them  nearer  to  Paris; 
they  are  only  fifty  miles  away  at  Noyon,  on 
the  Oise,  and  they  would  be  160  at  Verdun 
if  they  took  the  city.  If  they  took  Verdun 
they  would  get  control  of  the  Paris-Metz  Rail- 
way, and  if  they  then  drove  the  French  away 
from  the  trough  we  have  been  describing 
they  would  get  a  short  line  into  France,  and  a 
line  coming  from  German  territory  directly, 
not  passing  through  Belgium.  But  they 
would  not  be  nearer  to  Paris. 


102       THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

When  the  French  saw,  in  the  opening  days 
of  the  war,  that  forts  were  of  no  permanent 
value  against  the  German  guns  they  left  the 
forts  on  the  hills  above  Verdun  as  they  had 
abandoned  the  Vauban  works  and  moved 
north  for  a  few  miles.  Here  they  dug 
trenches,  mounted  their  guns  in  concealed 
positions,  and  stood  on  the  defensive,  as  they 
were  standing  elsewhere  from  Belgium  to 
Switzerland.  There  was  now  no  fortress  of 
Verdun,  and  Verdun  city  was  nothing  but  a 
point  behind  the  lines  of  trenches,  a  point  like 
Rheims,  or  Arras.  The  forts  of  the  rim  were 
equally  of  no  more  importance  and  were 
now  empty  of  guns  or  garrisons.  If  the 
Germans,  by  a  sudden  attack,  broke  all 
the  way  through  the  French  trenches  here 
it  would  be  quite  as  serious  as  if  they  broke 
through  at  other  points,  but  no  more  so. 
There  was  no  fortress  of  Verdun  and  the 
Verdun  position  commanded  nothing. 

The  Battle  of  Verdun,  as  it  is  disclosed  to 
an  observer  who  stands  on  Fort  de  la  Chaume, 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS        103 

a  mile  or  two  west  and  above  Verdun  and  in 
the  mouth  of  the  trough  we  have  described, 
was  this:  On  the  west  bank  of  the  Meuse, 
four  or  five  miles  northwest  of  the  town,  there 
is  a  steep  ridge  going  east  and  west  and  per- 
haps 1,100  feet  high.  This  is  the  crest  of 
Charny,  and  it  rises  sharply  from  the  flat 
valley  and  marches  to  the  west  without  a 
break  for  some  miles.  On  it  are  the  old  forts 
of  the  rim. 

Three  or  four  miles  still  to  the  north  is  a 
line  of  hills  which  are  separated  from  each 
other  by  deep  ravines  leading  north  and 
south.  Two  of  these  hills,  Le  Mort  Homme 
(Dead  Man's  Hill)  and  Hill  304,  have  been 
steadily  in  the  reports  for  many  weeks.  They 
are  the  present  front  of  the  French.  Between 
one  and  two  miles  still  to  the  north  are  other 
confused  and  tangled  hills  facing  north,  and 
it  was  here  that  the  French  lines  ran  when  the 
great  attack  began  in  the  third  week  of  Feb- 
ruary. On  this  side  the  Germans  have  ad- 
vanced rather  less  than  two  miles;  they  have 


104       THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

not  reached  the  Charny  Ridge,  which  is  the 
true  and  last  line  of  defence  of  the  Verdun 
position,  and  they  have  not  captured  the  two 
hills  to  the  north,  which  are  the  advanced 
position,  now  the  first  line. 

When  I  was  in  Paris  before  I  went  to  Ver- 
dun there  was  a  general  belief  that  the  French 
might  ultimately  abandon  the  two  outer 
hills,  Dead  Man's  and  304,  and  come  back 
to  the  Charny  Ridge,  which  is  a  wall  running 
from  the  river  west  without  a  break  for  miles. 
Apparently  this  has  not  been  found  necessary, 
but  what  is  worth  noting  is  that  if  these  hills 
were  evacuated  it  would  not  mean  the  with- 
drawal from  Verdun  but  only  to  the  best  line 
of  defence  (the  last  line,  to  be  sure),  which 
includes  the  town  itself. 

Now,  east  of  the  river  the  situation  is 
materially  different.  Between  the  Meuse 
and  the  level  plateau,  which  appears  in  the 
dispatches  from  the  front  as  the  Woevre,  is  a 
long,  narrow  ridge,  running  from  north  to 
south  for  perhaps  thirty-five  or  forty  miles. 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS        105 

This  is  the  Cote  de  Meuse,  or,  translated, 
the  Hills  of  the  Meuse.  The  range  is  never 
more  than  ten  miles  wide  and  at  many  points 
less  than  half  as  wide.  On  the  west  it  rises 
very  sharply  from  the  Meuse  and  on  the  east 
it  breaks  down  quite  as  abruptly  into  the 
Woevre  Plain.  It  cannot  be  effectively 
approached  from  the  Woevre,  because  the 
Woevre  is  an  exceedingly  marshy  plain,  with 
much  sub-surface  water  and  in  spring  a  mass 
of  liquid  clay. 

Now  the  French,  when  the  German  drive 
began,  stood  on  this  ridge  some  eight  miles, 
rather  less,  perhaps,  to  the  north  of  the  town 
of  Verdun;  their  line  ran  from  the  Meuse 
straight  east  along  this  ridge  and  then  turned 
at  right  angles  and  came  south  along  the 
eastern  edge  of  the  Meuse  Hills  and  the  shore 
of  the  Woevre  Plain  until  it  touched  the  river 
again  at  St.  Mihiel,  twenty  miles  to  the 
south,  where  the  Germans  had  broken  through 
the  Meuse  Hills  and  reached  the  river.  The 
German  attack  came  south  along  the  crest 


106       THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

of  this  ridge  because  the  German  heavy 
artillery  could  not  be  brought  over  the 
Woevre. 

About  halfway  between  the  French  front 
and  Verdun,  on  a  little  crest  somewhat  higher 
than  the  main  ridge,  the  French  had  erected 
a  line  of  forts,  just  as  they  had  on  the  Charny 
Ridge,  Forts  Douaumont  and  Vaux,  familiar 
names  now,  were  the  forts  most  distant  from 
Verdun.  But  the  French  here,  as  on  the 
other  side  of  the  river,  had  come  out  of  these 
forts,  abandoned  and  dismantled  them,  and 
taken  to  trenches  much  to  the  north.  It  was 
upon  these  trenches  that  the  main  German 
attack  fell,  and  in  the  first  days  the  French 
were  pushed  back  until  their  trench  line  fol- 
lowed the  crests  that  bear  the  old  forts,  and 
at  one  point,  at  Douaumont,  the  Germans 
had  actually  got  possession  of  one  of  the  old 
forts;  but  the  French  trenches  pass  in  front 
of  this  fort  at  a  distance  oi  but  a  few  hundred 
yards. 

Now,  in  the  first  days  of  the  battle  the  posi- 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS        107 

tion  of  the  French  on  the  east  bank  of  the 
Meuse  was  just  this:  the  troops  facing  north 
were  meeting  and  slowly  yielding  to  a  terrific 
drive  coming  south  and  southwest;  the  rest  of 
the  troops  that  faced  east  toward  the  Woevre 
were  not  attacked  severely.  But  as  the  Ger- 
mans came  south,  and  when  they  took  Douau- 
mont,  they  were  able  to  reach  the  bridges 
across  the  Meuse  behind  the  French  troops 
on  the  Meuse  Hills  and  to  destroy  them  by  in- 
direct fire,  and  these  French  troops,  more  than 
a  hundred  thousand  probably,  were  fighting 
with  their  backs  to  a  deep  river  and  exposed 
to  destruction  in  case  their  lines  did  not 
hold. 

In  this  situation  Joffre  proposed  to  take 
his  troops  behind  the  Meuse  and  on  the  hills 
to  the  west  and  above  the  city,  leaving  the 
city  to  the  Germans.  The  French  line  would 
thus  come  north  behind  the  Meuse  from  St. 
Mihiel  and  then  turn  west  above  Verdun, 
following  either  the  Charny  Ridge  or  else  the 
Hills  of  Regret  and  Chaume,  on  either  side 


of  the  trough,  described  above,  which  the  road 
to  Paris  follows. 

If  Verdun  were  a  fortress  actually;  if  either 
the  old  town  or  the  circle  of  forts  outside  had 
been  of  value,  Joffre  would  not  have  pro- 
posed this  thing.  But  they  were  of  no  value. 
Verdun  was  once  a  fortress  barring  the  way  to 
the  Plain  of  Chalons,  but  the  Germans  were  in 
the  plain,  having  come  through  Belgium  by 
the  back  door,  as  it  were.  The  forts  outside 
the  city  on  the  rim  of  the  basin  had  already 
been  abandoned  because  they  could  have 
been  destroyed  by  German  heavy  artillery, 
as  were  those  of  Liege  and  Antwerp.  Verdun 
was  just  a  position;  but  it  was  a  difficult 
position  to  defend  because  of  the  river,  which 
cut  off  one-half  the  army  and  could  be  crossed 
only  by  bridges,  which  were  under  indirect 
fire. 

If  the  French  had  come  back  to  the  Charny 
Ridge,  or  even  to  the  Regret  Hills  south  of  the 
trough  followed  by  the  Paris-Metz  road, 
they  would  have  stood  on  hills  of  patent 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS        109 

military  value;  the  trough  is  a  natural  ditch 
in  front.  These  hills  are  all  trenched  and  pre- 
pared for  defence.  The  French  would  merely 
have  shortened  their  lines  and  taken  an  easy 
position  to  defend,  instead  of  holding  a  bad 
position.  But  ultimately  this  would  have 
meant  the  relinquishing  of  Verdun,  the  little 
town  down  in  the  valley  below,  now  become 
a  heap  of  ruins  and  having  lost  its  military 
value  thirty  years  earlier,  when  heavy  artil- 
lery began  its  decisive  success  over  the  old 
fortifications. 

The  French  did  not  retire,  because  the  civil 
government  overruled  the  military;  decided 
that  the  moral  effect  of  the  withdrawal  from 
Verdun  would  be  disastrous  to  the  French 
and  advantageous  to  the  Germans.  Instead 
of  retiring,  the  French  stood  and  held  the 
hills  beyond  the  Charny  Ridge,  Dead  Man's 
and  304 ;  they  hold  them  still  and  seem  deter- 
mined to  keep  them.  But  remember  that 
they  can  still  retire  to  the  Charny  Ridge  if 
they  choose,  and  only  then  find  their  best  line 


110       THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

west  of  the  Meuse,  if  they  mean  to  hold  on  to 
the  city  of  Verdun. 

On  the  other  hand,  east  of  the  River  Meuse 
the  French  are  approximately  in  their  last 
line.  The  hills  and  crests  they  hold  upon  the 
Meuse  Hills  are  some  three  or  four  miles 
from  Verdun,  but  if  the  French  retired  far 
they  would  begin  to  come  down  hill,  with  a 
deep  river  at  their  backs.  In  consequence, 
whenever  you  hear  that  the  Germans  have 
made  some  slight  gain,  taken  a  trench  about 
Douaumont  or  Vaux,  you  are  certain  to  hear 
at  once  that  the  French  have  counter  attacked 
and  retaken  the  lost  ground. 

The  essential  thing  to  remember  is  that  the 
defence  of  Verdun  is  not  the  defence  of  a 
position  that  has  a  great  military  value. 
The  French  would  be  better  off,  would  lose 
fewer  men  and  run  smaller  risk  of  considerable 
losses  if  they  should  quit  the  east  bank  of  the 
Meuse  and  occupy  the  hills  back  of  Verdun 
on  the  west  bank.  On  the  west  bank  the 
Germans  have  never  made  any  material 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS        111 

gain,  and  they  have  not  come  within  reach 
of  the  hills  that  bear  the  old  forts.  But  the 
French  Government  has  decided  that  for 
political  reason,  for  reasons  that  affect  the 
moral,  not  the  military,  situation,  Verdun 
must  not  be  surrendered;  hence  the  army  is 
holding  it  at  a  cost  of  men  less  than  the  Ger- 
mans are  paying  to  take  it,  but  at  a  far  greater 
cost  than  would  be  necessary  to  hold  the 
better  positions  west  of  the  river. 

The  Germans  have  not  made  any  gain 
of  importance  in  nearly  two  months.  The 
French  are  very  sure  they  will  not  come 
farther  south.  They  are  as  confident  as 
men  could  be.  But  if  the  Germans  should 
come  farther  south  and  at  last  force  the 
French  to  come  back  behind  the  river  and 
to  the  hills  above  the  town,  they  would  only 
win  a  moral  victory.  The  military  situation 
would  not  be  changed,  unless  they  should  also 
pierce  the  French  lines  on  the  west  of  the 
river,  and  this  is  absolutely  unthinkable 
now. 


112       THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

If  you  think  of  Verdun  city  as  a  fortress 
you  will  put  yourself  in  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury. It  is  just  an  abandoned  town,  mostly 
ashes  and  completely  ruined  by  a  useless 
bombardment  after  the  main  German  ad- 
vance had  been  checked.  If  you  think  of 
Verdun  as  a  fortified  position,  like  Liege, 
which,  if  it  fell,  would  bring  disaster,  as  did 
the  fall  of  Liege,  you  are  thinking  in  terms 
of  the  situation  before  the  war.  The  forts 
of  this  position  have  all  been  abandoned  and 
the  French  are  fighting  in  trenches  in  all 
points  save  one  outside  this  circle  of  forts. 
If  you  think  of  Verdun  as  the  gateway  to 
anything,  you  are  thinking  of  something 
that  doesn't  exist.  It  was  a  gateway  to 
Central  France,  to  the  Plain  of  Chalons, 
from  the  German  frontier  before  the  Ger- 
mans came  down  into  the  Plain  of  Chalons 
from  the  north  through  Belgium. 

But  if  you  think  of  Verdun  as  a  place 
which  has  a  great  sentimental  value  for  both 
the  French  and  the  Germans;  if  you  think 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS        113 

of  it  as  a  place  which  by  reason  of  its  import- 
ance in  other  days  still  preserves  a  value  in 
the  minds  of  the  mass  of  the  French  and  Ger- 
man publics,  a  town  the  taking  of  which 
would  as  a  result  of  this  wholly  false  appraisal 
be  reckoned  in  Germany  as  a  great  victory, 
which  would  vastly  encourage  German  masses 
and  would  be  accepted  in  France  as  a  great 
defeat  which  would  equally  depress  the 
French  public,  you  will  think  of  the  battle  for 
Verdun  as  it  is. 

If  you  go  to  Verdun  you  will  see  that 
the  estimate  that  the  world  has  placed 
upon  it  is  illusory.  You  will  see  it  is  an 
abandoned  town.  You  will  see,  as  I  did, 
that  great  and  famous  forts  are  without  guns, 
and  you  will  see,  as  I  did,  that  the  positions 
which  the  French  have  prepared  behind  the 
Meuse  and  above  the  town  are  vastly  stronger 
than  those  which  they  have  held  successfully, 
in  Lorraine  or  any  other  place  where  the  at- 
tacks have  been  bitter,  for  nearly  two  years. 

There  are  no  forts,  fortifications,  fortresses, 


114       THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

in  this  war.  There  are  just  trenches,  and  the 
Verdun  sector  is  no  exception.  Verdun  is  not 
surrounded;  it  is  not  invested.  I  went  to  the 
town  from  Bar-le-Duc  in  an  automobile  with- 
out difficulty,  and  I  ran  back  to  Paris  by 
another  road,  through  Chalons,  with  equal 
ease.  The  Germans  have  never  got  within 
three  miles  of  the  town  on  any  side;  to  the 
west  of  the  River  Meuse  they  are  not  within 
six  miles  of  it.  They  are  not  gaining,  and 
have  not  been  gaining  for  weeks;  they  are 
merely  fighting  a  desperate  trench  campaign, 
and  the  French  are  fighting  back,  retaking 
trenches  on  the  east  of  the  river,  because 
they  are  in  their  last  line  on  this  bank  of  the 
river,  but  paying  less  attention  to  German 
trench  gains  on  the  west  because  the  Ger- 
mans are  still  far  from  the  Charny  Ridge, 
their  main  position. 

If  Verdun  falls,  that  is,  if  the  French  are 
compelled  under  pressure  or  as  a  result  of  the 
cost  of  holding  their  present  awkward  posi- 
tion to  go  back  behind  the  river,  they  will 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS        115 

lose  fifty  or  a  hundred  square  miles  of  French 
territory,  they  will  lose  all  the  tremendous 
value  of  the  moral  "lift"  which  the  suc- 
cessful defence  has  brought,  but  they  will  lose 
nothing  else;  and  when  the  Germans  have 
taken  Verdun,  the  ashes,  the  ruins,  they  will 
stop,  because  there  is  no  object  or  value  in 
further  attack.  They  are  fighting  for  moral 
values,  and  the  French  politician  has  over- 
ruled the  French  soldier  and  compelled  him  to 
accept  battle  on  unfavorable  ground  for 
this  same  moral  value,  but  against  his  mili- 
tary judgment.  He  has  done  it  successfully. 
He  expects  and  France  expects  that  he  will 
continue  to  do  it  successfully,  but  in  the 
wholly  remote  contingency  that  he  failed 
(I  can  only  say  that  it  is  a  contingency  no 
longer  considered  in  France),  a  loss  in  moral 
advantage  would  be  the  only  consequence. 


V 

IN  SIGHT  OF  THE  PROMISED  LAND- 
ON  THE  LORRAINE  BATTLEFIELD 

IN  THE  third  week  of  August,  1914,  a 
French  army  crossed  the  frontier  of  Al- 
sace-Lorraine and  entered  the  Promised 
Land,  toward  which  all  Frenchmen  had 
looked  in  hope  and  sadness  for  forty-four 
years.  The  long-forgotten  communiques  of 
that  early  period  of  the  war  reported  success 
after  success,  until  at  last  it  was  announced 
that  the  victorious  French  armies  had  reached 
Sarrebourg  and  Morhange,  and  were  astride 
the  Strassburg-Metz  Railroad.  And  then 
Berlin  took  up  the  cry,  and  France  and  the 
world  learned  of  a  great  German  victory  and 
of  the  defeat  and  rout  of  the  invading  army. 
Even  Paris  conceded  that  the  retreat  had  be- 
gun and  the  "army  of  liberation"  was  crowd- 
lie 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS        117 

ing  back  beyond  the  frontier  and  far  within 
French  territory. 

Then  the  curtain  of  the  censorship  fell  and 
the  world  turned  to  the  westward  to  watch 
the  terrible  battle  for  Paris.  In  the  agony  and 
glory  of  the  Marne  the  struggle  along  the 
Moselle  was  forgotten;  the  Battle  of  Nancy,  of 
Lorraine,  was  fought  and  won  in  the  darkness, 
and  when  the  safety  of  Paris  was  assured  the 
world  looked  toward  the  Aisne,  and  then 
toward  Flanders.  So  it  came  about  that  one 
of  the  greatest  battles  of  the  whole  war,  one  of 
the  most  important  of  the  French  victories, 
the  success  that  made  the  Marne  possible,  the 
rally  and  stand  of  the  French  armies  about 
Nancy,  escaped  the  fame  it  earned.  Only  in 
legend,  in  the  romance  of  the  Kaiser  with  his 
cavalry  waiting  on  the  hills  to  enter  the  Lor- 
raine capital,  did  the  battle  live. 

When  I  went  to  France  one  of  the  hopes  I 
had  cherished  was  that  I  might  be  permitted 
to  visit  this  battlefield,  to  see  the  ground  on 
which  a  great  battle  had  been  fought,  that 


118       THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

was  still  unknown  country,  in  the  main,  for 
jthose  who  have  written  on  the  war.  The  Lor- 
raine field  was  the  field  on  which  France  and 
Germany  had  planned  for  a  generation  to 
fight.  Had  the  Germans  respected  the  neu- 
trality of  Belgium,  it  is  by  Nancy,  by  the  gap 
between  the  Vosges  and  the  hills  of  the  Meuse, 
that  they  must  have  broken  into  France.  The 
Marne  was  a  battlefield  which  was  reached  by 
chance  and  fought  over  by  hazard,  but  every 
foot  of  the  Lorraine  country  had  been  studied 
for  the  fight  long  years  in  advance.  Here  war 
followed  the  natural  course,  followed  the 
plans  of  the  general  staff  prepared  years  in  ad- 
vance. Indeed,  I  had  treasured  over  years  a 
plan  of  the  Battle  of  Nancy,  contained  in  a 
French  book  written  years  ago,  which  might 
serve  as  the  basis  for  a  history  of  what  hap- 
pened, as  it  was  written  as  a  prophecy  of 
what  was  to  come. 

When  the  Great  General  Staff  was  pleased 
to  grant  my  request  to  see  the  battlefield  of 
Nancy  I  was  advised  to  travel  by  train  to  that 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS        119 

town  accompanied  by  an  officer  from  the 
General  Staff,  and  informed  that  I  should 
there  meet  an  officer  of  the  garrison,  who 
would  conduct  me  to  all  points  of  interest  and 
explain  in  detail  the  various  phases  of  the  con- 
flict. Tims  it  fell  out,  and  I  have  to  thank 
Commandant  Leroux  for  the  courtesy  and 
consideration  which  made  this  excursion  suc- 
cessful. 

In  peace  time  one  goes  from  Paris  to  Nancy 
in  five  hours,  and  the  distance  is  about  that 
from  New  York  to  Boston,  by  Springfield.  In 
war  all  is  different,  and  the  time  almost 
doubled.  Yet  there  are  compensations.  Think 
of  the  New  York-Boston  trip  as  bringing 
you  beyond  New  Haven  to  the  exact  rear 
of  battle,  of  battle  but  fifteen  miles  away, 
with  the  guns  booming  in  the  distance  and  the 
aeroplanes  and  balloons  in  full  view.  Think 
also  of  this  same  trip,  which  from  Hartford  to 
Worchester  follows  the  line  of  a  battle  not  yet 
two  years  old,  a  battle  that  has  left  its  traces 
in  ruined  villages,  in  shattered  houses.  On 


120       THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

either  side  of  the  railroad  track  the  graves  de- 
scend to  meet  the  embankments;  you  can 
mark  the  advance  and  the  retreat  by  the 
crosses  which  fill  the  fields.  The  gardens  that 
touch  the  railroad  and  extend  to  the  rear  of 
houses  in  the  little  towns  are  filled  with 
graves.  Each  enclosure  has  been  fought  for  at 
the  point  of  the  bayonet,  and  every  garden 
wall  recalls  the  Chateau  of  Hougoumont,  at 
Waterloo. 

All  this  was  two  years  ago,  but  there  is  to- 
day, also.  East  of  Bar-le-Duc  the  main  line  is 
cut  by  German  shell  fire  now.  From  Fort 
Camp  des  Remains  above  St.  Mihiel  German 
guns  sweep  the  railroad  near  Commercy,  and 
one  has  to  turn  south  by  a  long  detour,  as  if 
one  went  to  Boston  by  Fitchburg,  travel  south 
through  the  country  of  Jeanne  d'Arc1  and  re- 
turn by  Toul,  whose  forts  look  out  upon  the 
invaded  land.  Thus  one  comes  to  Nancy  by 
night,  and  only  by  night,  for  twenty  miles 
beyond  there  are  Germans  and  a  German  can- 
non, which  not  so  long  ago  sent  a  shell  into  the 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS        121 

town  and  removed  a  whole  city  block  beside 
the  railroad  station.  It  is  the  sight  of  this  ruin 
as  you  enter  the  town  which  reminds  you  that 
you  are  at  the  front,  but  there  are  other  re- 
minders. 

As  we  ate  our  dinner  in  the  cafe,  facing  the 
beautiful  Place  Stanislas,  we  were  disturbed 
by  a  strange  and  curious  drumming  sound. 
Going  out  into  the  square,  we  saw  an  aero- 
plane, or  rather  its  lights,  red  and  green,  like 
those  of  a  ship.  It  was  the  first  of  several, 
the  night  patrol,  rising  slowly  and  steadily, 
and  then  sweeping  off  in  a  wide  curve  toward 
the  enemy's  line.  They  were  the  sentries  of 
the  air  which  were  to  guard  us  while  we  slept, 
for  men  do  sentry-go  in  the  air  as  well  as  on 
the  earth  about  the  capital  of  Lorraine.  Then 
the  searchlights  on  the  hills  began  to  play, 
sweeping  the  horizon  toward  that  same  mys- 
terious region  where  beyond  the  darkness 
there  is  war. 

The  next  morning  I  woke  with  the  sense  of 
Fourth  of  July.  Bang!  Bang!  Bang!  Such 


122        THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

a  barking  of  cannon  crackers  I  had  never 
heard.  Still  drowsy,  I  pushed  open  the  French 
windows  and  looked  down  on  the  square' 
There  I  beheld  a  hundred  or  more  men,  women, 
and  children,  their  eyes  fixed  on  something  in 
the  air  above  and  behind  the  hotel.  Still  the 
incessant  barking  of  guns,  with  the  occasional 
boom  of  something  more  impressive.  With 
difficulty  I  grasped  the  fact.  I  was  in  the 
midst  of  a  Taube  raid.  Somewhere  over  my 
head,  invisible  to  me  because  of  the  wall  of 
my  hotel,  a  German  aeroplane  was  flying,  and 
all  the  anti-aircraft  guns  were  shooting  at  it. 
Was  it  carrying  bombs?  Should  I  presently 
see  or  feel  the  destruction  following  the  de- 
scent of  these? 

But  the  Taube  turned  away,  the  guns  fired 
less  and  less  frequently,  the  people  in  the 
streets  drifted  away,  the  children  to  school, 
the  men  to  work,  the  women  to  wait.  It  was 
just  a  detail  in  their  lives,  as  familiar  as  the  in- 
coming steamer  to  the  commuters  on  the 
North  River  ferryboats.  Some  portion  of  war 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS        123 

has  been  the  day's  history  of  Nancy  for  nearly 
two  years  now.  The  children  do  not  carry  gas 
masks  to  school  with  them  as  they  do  at  Pont- 
a-Mousson,  a  dozen  miles  to  the  north,  but 
women  and  children  have  been  killed  by  Ger- 
man shells,  by  bombts,  brought  by  Zeppelins 
and  by  aeroplanes.  There  is  always  excite- 
ment of  sorts  in  the  district  of  Nancy. 

After  a  breakfast,  broken  by  the  return  of 
the  aeroplanes  we  had  seen  departing  the 
night  before  for  the  patrol,  we  entered  our 
cars  and  set  out  for  the  front,  for  the  near- 
front,  for  the  lines  a  few  miles  behind  the  pres- 
ent trenches,  where  Nancy  was  saved  but  two 
years  ago.  Our  route  lay  north  along  the  val- 
ley of  the  Meurthe,  a  smiling  broad  valley, 
marching  north  and  south  and  meeting  in  a 
few  miles  that  of  the  Moselle  coming  east.  It 
was  easy  to  believe  that  one  was  riding 
through  the  valley  of  the  Susquehanna,  with 
spring  and  peace  in  the  air.  Toward  the  east 
a  wall  of  hills  shut  out  the  view.  This  was  the 
shoulder  of  the  Grand  Couronne,  the  wall 


124        THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

against  which  German  violence  burst  and 
broke  in  September,  1914. 

Presently  we  came  to  a  long  stretch  of  road 
walled  in  on  the  river  side  by  brown  canvas, 
exactly  the  sort  of  thing  that  is  used  at  foot- 
ball games  to  shut  out  the  non-paying  public. 
But  it  had  another  purpose  here.  We  were 
within  the  vision  of  the  Germans,  across  the 
river,  on  the  heights  behind  the  forest,  which 
outlined  itself  at  the  skyline;  there  were  the 
Kaiser's  troops  and  that  forest  was  the  Bois- 
le-Pretre,  the  familiar  incident  in  so  many 
communiques  since  the  war  began.  Thanks 
to  the  canvas,  it  was  possible  for  the  French  to 
move  troops  along  this  road  without  inviting 
German  shells.  Yet  it  was  impossible  to  de- 
rive any  large  feeling  of  security  from  a  can- 
vas wall,  which  alone  interposed  between  you 
and  German  heavy  artillery. 

We  passed  through  several  villages  and 
each  was  crowded  with  troops;  cavalry,  in- 
fantry, all  the  branches  represented;  it  was 
still  early  and  the  soldiers  were  just  beginning 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS        125 

their  day's  work;  war  is  so  completely  a  busi- 
ness here.  Transport  wagons  marched  along 
the  roads,  companies  of  soldiers  filed  by.  In- 
terspersed with  the  soldiers  were  civilians,  the 
women  and  children,  for  none  of  the  villages 
are  evacuated.  Not  even  the  occasional  boom 
of  a  gun  far  off  could  give  to  this  thing  the 
character  of  real  war.  It  recalled  the  days  of 
my  soldiering  in  the  militia  camp  at  Framing- 
ham  in  Massachusetts.  It  wTas  simply  im- 
possible to  believe  that  it  was  real.  Even  the 
faces  of  the  soldiers  were  smiling.  There  was 
no  such  sense  of  terribleness,  of  strain  and 
weariness  as  I  later  found  about  Verdun.  The 
Lorraine  front  is  now  inactive,  tranquil;  it  has 
been  quiet  so  long  that  men  have  forgotten  all 
the  carnage  and  horror  of  the  earlier  time. 

We  turned  out  of  the  valley  and  climbed 
abruptly  up  the  hillside.  In  a  moment  we 
came  into  the  centre  of  a  tiny  village  and 
looked  into  a  row  of  houses,  whose  roofs 
had  been  swept  off  by  shell  fire.  Here  and 
there  a  whole  house  was  gone;  next  door  the 


126        THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

house  was  undisturbed  and  the  women  and 
children  looked  out  of  the  doors.  The  village 
was  St.  Genevieve,  and  we  were  at  the  ex- 
treme front  of  the  French  in  August,  and 
against  this  hill  burst  the  flood  of  German 
invasion.  Leaving  the  car  we  walked  out  of 
the  village,  and  at  the  end  of  the  street  a  sign 
warned  the  wayfarer  not  to  enter  the  fields, 
for  which  we  were  bound:  "War — do  not 
trespass."  This  was  the  burden  of  the 
warning. 

Once  beyond  this  sign  we  came  out  sud- 
denly upon  an  open  plateau,  upon  trenches. 
Northward  the  slope  descended  to  a  valley 
at  our  feet.  It  was  cut  and  seamed  by 
trenches,  and  beyond  the  trenches  stood  the 
posts  that  carried  the  barbed-wire  entangle- 
ments. Here  and  there,  amidst  the  trenches, 
there  were  graves.  I  went  down  to  the 
barbed-wire  entanglements  and  examined 
them  curiously.  They  at  least  were  real. 
Once  thousands  of  men  had  come  up  out  of  the 
little  woods  a  quarter  of  a  mile  below;  they 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS        127 

had  come  on  in  that  famous  massed  attack, 
they  had  come  on  in  the  face  of  machine  gun 
and  "seventy-fives."  They  had  just  reached 
the  wires,  which  marked  high  water.  In  the 
woods  below,  the  Bois  de  Facq,  in  the  fields 
by  the  river  4,000  Germans  had  been  buried. 
Looking  out  from  the  trenches  the  whole 
country  unfolded.  Northward  the  little  vil- 
lage of  Atton  slept  under  the  steep  slope  of 
C6te-de-Mousson,  a  round  pinnacle  crowned 
with  an  ancient  chateau.  From  the  hill  the 
German  artillery  had  swept  the  ground  where 
I  stood.  Below  the  hill  to  the  west  was 
Pont-a-Mousson,  the  city  of  150  bombard- 
ments, which  the  Germans  took  when  they 
came  south  and  lost  later.  Above  it  was  the 
Bois-le-Pretre,  in  which  guns  were  now  boom- 
ing occasionally.  Far  to  the  north  was  an- 
other hill,  just  visible,  and  its  slope  toward 
us  was  cut  and  seamed  with  yellow  slashes: 
Those  were  the  French  trenches,  then  of  the 
second  or  third  line;  beyond  there  was  still 
another  hill,  it  was  slightly  blurred  in  the 


128       THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

haze,  but  it  was  not  over  five  miles  away,  and 
it  was  occupied  by  the  Germans.  From 
the  slope  above  me  on  a  clear  day  it  is  possible 
to  see  Metz,  so  near  are  French  and  German 
lines  to  the  old  frontier. 

Straight  across  the  river  to  the  west  of 
us  was  another  wood,  with  a  glorious  name, 
the  Forest  of  the  Advance  Guard.  It  swept 
to  the  south  of  us.  In  that  wood  the  Ger- 
mans had  also  planted  their  guns  on  the  day 
of  battle.  They  had  swept  the  trenches 
where  I  stood  from  three  sides.  Plainly  it 
had  been  a  warm  corner.  But  the  French 
had  held  on.  Their  commander  had  re- 
ceived a  verbal  order  to  retreat.  He  insisted 
that  it  should  be  put  in  writing,  and  this  took 
time.  The  order  came.  It  had  to  be  obeyed, 
but  he  obeyed  alowly.  Reluctantly  the 
men  left  the  trenches  they  had  held  so  long. 
They  slipped  southward  along  the  road  by 
which  we  had  come.  But  suddenly  their 
rear  guards  discovered  the  Germans  were 
also  retreating.  So  the  French  came  back 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS        129 

and  the  line  of  St.  Genevieve  was  held,  the 
northern  door  to  Nancy  was  not  forced. 

Looking  down  again  it  was  not  difficult 
to  reconstitute  that  German  assault,  made 
at  night.  The  thing  was  so  simple  the 
civilian  could  grasp  it.  A  road  ran  through 
the  valley  and  along  it  the  Germans  had 
formed;  the  slope  they  had  to  advance  up 
was  gentle,  far  more  gradual  than  that  of 
San  Juan.  They  had  been  picked  troops 
selected  for  a  forlorn  hope,  and  they  had 
come  back  four  times.  The  next  morning 
the  whole  forest  had  been  filled  with  dead 
and  dying.  Not  less  than  a  division — 20,000 
men — had  made  the  terrible  venture.  Now 
there  was  a  strange  sense  of  emptiness  in  the 
country;  war  had  come  and  gone,  left  its 
graves,  its  trenches,  its  barbed-wire  entan- 
glements; but  these  were  all  disappearing 
already.  On  this  beautiful  spring  morning 
it  wras  impossible  to  feel  the  reality  of  what 
happened  here,  what  was  happening  now, 
in  some  measure,  five  miles  or  more  to  the 


130        THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

north.  Nature  is  certainly  the  greatest  of 
all  pacifists;  she  will  not  permit  the  signs  of 
war  to  endure  nor  the  mind  to  believe  that 
war  itself  has  existed  and  exists. 

From  St.  Genevieve  we  went  to  the  Grand 
Mont  d'Amance,  the  most  famous  point  in 
all  the  Lorraine  front,  the  southeast  corner 
of  the  Grand  Couronne,  as  St.  Genevieve  is 
the  northern.  Here,  from  a  hill  some  1,300 
feet  high,  one  looks  eastward  into  the  Prom- 
ised Land  of  France — into  German  Lorraine. 
In  the  early  days  of  August  the  great  French 
invasion,  resting  one  flank  upon  this  hill,  the 
other  upon  the  distant  Vosges,  had  stepped 
over  the  frontier.  One  could  trace  its  route 
to  the  distant  hills  among  which  it  had  found 
disaster.  In  these  hills  the  Germans  had 
hidden  their  heavy  guns,  and  the  French, 
coming  under  their  fire  without  warning, 
unsupported  by  heavy  artillery,  which  was 
lacking  to  them,  had  broken.  Then  the 
German  invasion  had  rolled  back.  You 
could  follow  the  route.  In  the  foreground 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS        131 

the  little  Seille  River  could  be  discerned; 
it  marked  the  old  frontier.  Across  this 
had  come  the  defeated  troops.  They  had 
swarmed  down  the  low,  bare  hills;  they  had 
crossed  and  vanished  in  the  woods  just  at  my 
feet;  these  woods  were  the  Forest  of  Cham- 
penoux.  Into  this  forest  the  Germans  had 
followed  by  the  thousand,  they  were  astride 
the  main  road  to  Nancy,  which  rolled  white 
and  straight  at  my  feet.  But  in  the  woods 
the  French  rallied.  For  days  there  was  fought 
in  this  stretch  of  trees  one  of  the  most  terrible 
of  battles. 

As  I  stood  on  the  Grand  Mont  I  faced  al- 
most due  east.  In  front  of  me  and  to  the 
south  extended  the  forest.  Exactly  at  my 
feet  the  forest  reached  up  the  hill  and  there 
was  a  little  cluster  of  buildings  about  a 
fountain.  All  was  in  ruins,  and  here,  ex- 
actly here,  was  the  high  water  mark  of  the 
German  advance.  They  had  occupied  the 
ruins  for  a  few  moments  and  then  had 
been  driven  out.  Elsewhere  they  had  never 


132       THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

emerged  from  the  woods;  they  had  ap- 
proached the  western  shore,  but  the  French 
had  met  them  with  machine  guns  and 
"seventy-fives."  The  brown  woods  at  my 
feet  were  nothing  but  a  vast  cemetery; 
thousands  of  French  and  German  soldiers 
slept  there. 

In  their  turn  the  Germans  had  gone  back. 
Now,  in  the  same  woods,  a  French  battery 
was  shelling  the  Germans  on  the  other  side  of 
the  Seille.  Under  the  glass  I  studied  the  little 
villages  unfolding  as  on  a  map;  they  were  all 
destroyed,  but  it  was  impossible  to  recognize 
this.  Some  were  French,  some  German;  you 
could  follow  the  line,  but  there  were  no 
trenches;  behind  them  French  shells  were 
bursting  occasionally  and  black  smoke  rose 
just  above  the  ground.  Thousands  of  men 
faced  each  other  less  than  four  miles  from 
where  I  stood,  but  all  that  there  was  to  be 
detected  were  the  shell  bursts;  otherwise  one 
saw  a  pleasant  country,  rolling  hills,  mostly 
without  woods,  bare  in  the  spring,  which 


133 

had  not  yet  come  to  turn  them  green.  In 
the  foreground  ran  that  arbitrary  line  Bis- 
marck had  drawn  between  Frenchmen  forty- 
six  years  before — the  frontier — but  of  natural 
separation  there  was  none.  He  had  cut  off  a 
part  of  France,  that  was  all,  and  one  looked 
upon  what  had  been  and  was  still  a  bleeding 
wound. 

I  asked  the  French  commandant  about  the 
various  descriptions  made  by  those  who  have 
written  about  the  war.  They  have  described 
the  German  attack  as  mounting  the  slope  of 
the  Grand  Mont,  where  we  stood.  He  took 
me  to  the  edge  and  pointed  down.  It  was  a 
cliff  almost  as  steep  as  the  Palisades.  "C'est 
une  blague,"  he  smiled.  "Just  a  story." 
The  Germans  had  not  charged  here,  but  in  the 
forest  below,  where  the  Nancy  road  passed 
through  and  enters  the  valley  of  the  Amezeule. 
They  had  not  tried  to  carry  but  to  turn  the 
Grand  Mont.  More  than  200,000  men  had 
fought  for  days  in  the  valley  below.  I  asked 
him  about  the  legend  of  the  Kaiser,  sitting  on 


134       THEY  SHALL   NOT   PASS 

a  hill,  waiting  in  white  uniform  with  his 
famous  escort,  waiting  until  the  road  was 
clear  for  his  triumphal  entrance  into  the  capi- 
tal of  Lorraine.  He  laughed.  I  might  choose 
my  hill;  if  the  Emperor  had  done  this  thing  the 
hill  was  "over  there,"  but  had  he?  They  are 
hard  on  legends  at  the  front,  and  the  tales  that 
delight  Paris  die  easily  on  the  frontiers  of  war. 
But  since  I  had  asked  so  much  about  the 
fighting  my  commandant  promised  to  take 
me  in  the  afternoon  to  the  point  where  the 
struggle  had  been  fiercest,  still  farther  to  the 
south,  where  all  the  hills  break  down  and  there 
is  a  natural  gateway  from  Germany  into 
France,  the  beginning  of  the  famous  Charmes 
Gap,  through  which  the  German  road  to 
Paris  from  the  east  ran,  and  still  runs.  Leav- 
ing Nancy  behind  us,  and  ascending  the 
Meurthe  valley  on  the  eastern  bank,  turning 
out  of  it  before  Saint  Nicholas  du  Port,  we 
came  presently  to  the  most  completely  war- 
swept  fields  that  I  have  ever  seen.  On  a 
perfectly  level  plain  the  little  town  of  liar- 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS       135 

aucourt  stands  in  sombre  ruins.  Its  houses 
are  nothing  but  ashes  and  rubble.  Go  out 
of  the  village  toward  the  east  and  you  enter 
fields  pockmarked  by  shell  fire.  For  several 
miles  you  can  walk  from  shell  hole  to  shell 
hole.  The  whole  country  is  a  patchwork  of 
these  shell  holes.  At  every  few  rods  a  new 
line  of  old  trenches  approaches  the  road  and 
wanders  away  again.  Barbed-wire  entangle- 
ments run  up  and  down  the  gently  sloping 
hillsides. 

Presently  we  came  out  upon  a  perfectly 
level  field.  It  was  simply  torn  by  shell 
fire.  Old  half-filled  trenches  wandered  aim- 
lessly about,  and  beyond,  under  a  gentle 
slope,  the  little  village  of  Courbessaux  stood 
in  ruins.  The  commandant  called  my  at- 
tention to  a  bit  of  woods  in  front. 

"The  Germans  had  their  machine  guns 
there,"  said  he.  "We  didn't  know  it,  and 
a  French  brigade  charged  across  this  field. 
It  started  at  8:15,  and  at  8:30  it  had  lost 
more  than  3,000  out  of  6,000.  Then  the 


136       THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

Germans  came  out  of  the  woods  in  their 
turn,  and  our  artillery,  back  at  Haraucourt, 
caught  them  and  they  lost  3,500  men  in  a 
quarter  of  an  hour.  Along  the  roadside 
were  innumerable  graves.  We  looked  at 
one.  It  was  marked:  "Here  196  French." 
Twenty  feet  distant  was  another;  it  was 
marked:  "Here  196  Germans."  In  the  field 
where  we  stood  I  was  told  some  10,000  men 
are  buried.  They  were  buried  hurriedly,  and 
even  now  when  j't  rains  arms  and  legs  are 
exposed. 

Two  years  had  passed,  almost  two  years, 
since  this  field  had  been  fought  for.  The 
Germans  had  taken  it.  They  had  ap- 
proached Haraucourt,  but  had  not  passed 
it.  This  was  the  centre  and  the  most  vital 
point  in  the  Lorraine  battle.  What  Foch's 
troops  had  done  about  La  Fere  Charnpe- 
noise,  those  of  Castelnau  had  done  here. 
The  German  wave  had  been  broken,  but 
at  what  cost?  And  now,  after  so  many 
months,  the  desolation  of  war  remained. 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS       137 

But  yet  it  was  not  to  endure.  Beside  the 
very  graves  an  old  peasant  was  ploughing, 
guiding  his  plough  and  his  horses  carefully 
among  the  tombs.  Four  miles  away  more 
trenches  faced  each  other  and  the  battle  went 
on  audibly,  but  behind  this  line,  in  this  very 
field  where  so  many  had  died,  life  was  be- 
ginning. 

Later  we  drove  south,  passing  within  the 
lines  the  Germans  had  held  in  their  great 
advance,  we  travelled  through  Luneville, 
whieh  they  had  taken  and  left  unharmed, 
save  as  shell  fire  had  wrecked  an  eastern 
suburb.  We  visited  Gerbeviller,  where  in 
an  excess  of  rage  the  Germans  had  burned 
every  structure  in  the  town.  I  have  never 
seen  such  a  headquarters  of  desolation. 
Everything  that  had  a  shape,  that  had  a 
semblance  of  beauty  or  of  use,  lies  in  com- 
plete ruin,  detached  houses,  a  chateau,  the 
blocks  in  the  village,  all  in  ashes.  Save  for 
Sermaize,  Gerbeviller  is  the  most  completely 
wrecked  town  in  France. 


138       THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

You  enter  the  village  over  a  little  bridge 
across  the  tiny  Mortagne.  Here  some  French 
soldiers  made  a  stand  and  held  off  the  Ger- 
man advance  for  some  hours.  There  was 
no  other  battle  at  Gerbeviller,  but  for  this 
defence  the  town  died.  Never  was  death 
so  complete.  Incendiary  material  was  placed 
in  every  house,  and  all  that  thoroughness 
could  do  to  make  the  destruction  complete 
was  done.  Gerbeviller  is  dead,  a  few  women 
and  children  live  amidst  its  ashes,  there  is  a 
wooden  barrack  by  the  bridge  with  a  post- 
office  and  the  inevitable  postcards,  but  only 
on  postcards,  picture  postcards,  does  the 
town  live.  It  will  be  a  place  of  pilgrimage 
when  peace  comes. 

From  Gerbeviller  we  went  by  Bayon  to  the 
Plateau  of  Saffais,  the  ridge  between  the 
Meurthe  and  the  Moselle,  where  the  defeated 
army  of  Castelnau  made  its  last  and  success- 
ful stand.  The  French  line  came  south  from 
St.  Genevieve,  where  we  had  been  in  the 
morning,  through  the  Grand  Mont,  across 


THEY   SHALL  NOT  PASS       139 

the  plain  by  Haraucourt  and  Corbessaux, 
then  crossed  the  Meurthe  by  Dombasle  and 
stood  on  the  heights  from  Rossieres  south. 
Having  taken  Luneville,  the  Germans  at- 
tempted to  cross  the  Meurthe  coming  out  of 
the  Forest  of  Vitrimont. 

Standing  on  the  Plateau  of  Saffais  and 
facing  east,  the  whole  country  unfolded 
again,  as  it  did  at  the  Grand  Mont.  The 
face  of  the  plateau  is  seamed  with  trenches. 
They  follow  the  slopes,  and  the  village  of 
Saffais  stands  out  like  a  promontory.  On 
this  ridge  the  French  had  massed  three 
hundred  cannon.  Their  army  had  come 
back  in  ruins,  and  to  steady  it  they  had  been 
compelled  to  draw  troops  from  Alsace. 
Miilhausen  was  sacrificed  to  save  Nancy. 
Behind  these  crests  on  which  we  stood  a 
beaten  army,  almost  routed,  had  in  three 
days  found  itself  and  returned  to  the  charge. 

In  the  shadow  of  the  dusk  I  looked  across 
the  Meurthe  into  the  brown  mass  of  the  For- 
est of  Vitrimont.  Through  this  had  come 


140       THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

the  victorious  Germans.  They  had  de- 
bouched from  the  wood;  they  had  approached 
the  river,  hidden  under  the  slope,  but,  swept 
by  the  hell  of  this  artillery  storm,  they  had 
broken.  But  few  had  lived  to  pass  the  river, 
none  had  mounted  the  slopes.  There  were 
almost  no  graves  along  these  trenches.  After- 
ward the  Germans  had  in  turn  yielded  to 
pressure  from  the  south  and  gone  back.  Be- 
fore the  Battle  of  the  Marne  began  the  Ger- 
man wave  of  invasion  had  been  stopped  here 
in  the  last  days  of  August.  A  second  terrific 
drive,  coincident  with  the  Marne,  had  like- 
wise failed.  Then  the  Germans  had  gone 
back  to  the  frontier.  The  old  boundary  line 
of  Bismarck  is  now  in  many  instances  an 
actual  line  of  fire,  and  nowhere  on  this  front 
are  the  Germans  more  than  three  or  four  miles 
within  French  territory. 

If  you  should  look  at  the  map  of  the  wholly 
imaginary  Battle  of  Nancy,  drawn  by  Colonel 
Boucher  to  illustrate  his  book,  published 
before  1910,  a  book  describing  the  problem 


THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS       141 

of  the  defence  of  the  eastern  frontier,  you  will 
find  the  lines  on  which  the  French  stood  at 
Saffais  indicated  exactly.  Colonel  Boucher 
had  not  dreamed  this  battle,  but  for  a  gener- 
ation the  French  General  Staff  had  planned 
it.  Here  they  had  expected  to  meet  the 
German  thrust.  When  the  Germans  decided 
to  go  by  Belgium  they  had  in  turn  taken  the 
offensive,  but,  having  failed,  they  had  fought 
their  long-planned  battle. 

Out  of  all  the  region  of  war,  of  war  to-day 
and  war  yesterday,  one  goes  back  to  Nancy, 
to  its  busy  streets,  its  crowds  of  people  re- 
turning from  their  day's  work.  War  is  less 
than  fifteen  miles  away,  but  Nancy  is  as  calm 
as  London  is  nervous.  Its  bakers  still  make 
macaroons;  even  Taube  raids  do  not  excuse 
the  children  from  punctual  attendance  at 
school.  Nancy  is  calm  with  the  calmness  of 
all  France,  but  with  just  a  touch  of  something 
more  than  calmness,  which  forty-six  years  of 
living  by  an  open  frontier  brings.  Twenty- 
one  months  ago  it  was  the  gauge  of  battle, 


142       THEY  SHALL  NOT  PASS 

and  half  a  million  men  fought  for  it;  a  new 
German  drive  may  approach  it  at  any  time. 
Out  toward  the  old  frontier  there  is  still  a 
German  gun,  hidden  in  the  Forest  of  Bezange, 
which  has  turned  one  block  to  ashes  and  may 
fire  again  at  any  hour.  Zeppelins  have  come 
and  gone,  leaving  dead  women  and  children 
behind  them,  but  Nancy  goes  on  with  to-day. 
And  to-morrow?  In  the  hearts  of  all  the 
people  of  this  beautiful  city  there  is  a  single 
and  a  simple  faith.  Nancy  turns  her  face 
toward  the  ancient  frontier,  she  looks  hope- 
fully out  upon  the  shell-swept  Grand  Cour- 
onne  and  beyond  to  the  Promised  Land. 
And  the  people  say  to  you,  if  you  ask  them 
about  war  and  about  peace,  as  one  of  them 
said  to  me:  "Peace  will  come,  but  not  until 
we  have  our  ancient  frontier,  not  until  we 
have  Metz  and  Strassburg.  We  have  waited 
a  long  time,  is  it  not  so?" 


THE  COUNTRY   LIFE  PRESS,   GARDEN  CITY,  NEW   YORK 


,<p  -K" 


V. 

UC  SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILITY 


A    001  368  881    7 


